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Blackguard 

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CUdlbceStnilfi 


CHICAGO 

COVICI-M'GEE  •  PUBLISHERS 
'925 


Copyright  1923 

Covici-cMcGee 

Chicago 

First  Printing,  March,  iq23 


CONTENTS 

^ART  ONE 
The  Stru^^le Pa^e  1 

^ART  TWO 
The  Knife Pa^e  121 

^ART  THREE 
Instigation Pa^e  181 


891C4G 


PART  I 
THE  STRUGGLE 


BLACKGUARD 


The  Stmg,g,le 

CHAPTER   I. 

ARL  Felman  stepped  from  a  train 
at  the  Union  Station  of  a  mid- 
western,  American  city.  His 
young  face,  partly  obscured  by  a 
blonde  stubble  of  beard,  was  a 
passive  concealment,  and  his  thin 
lips  and  long  nose  did  not  hold  that  stalwart  sleek- 
ness which  one  associates  with  earth.  If  some 
joker  had  taken  a  Gothic  effigy  of  Christ,  trimmed 
its  beard,  dressed  it  in  grey  and  dirty  clothes,  and 
forced  upon  it  an  unwilling  animation,  he  would 
have  produced  an  exact  duplicate  of  Carl's  aspect 
and  gestures. 

In  the  emotional  confusion  of  the  railroad- 
station,  with  its  reluctant  farewells  and  gushing 
greetings,  Carl  walked  alone  and  abstracted, 
and  he  treated  the  scene  as  though  it  were  a 
feverishly  unreal  mixture  of  drama  and  travesty. 
He  strode  with  the  careful  haste  of  one  who  seeks 


BLACKGUARD 

to  escape  from  an  irritating  dream  but  knows  at 
the  same  time  that  his  efforts  are  futile.  He  was 
without  baggage,  and  his  face  held  the  strain 
that  comes  from  battling  with  open  spaces  and 
strange  faces — the  hunted  question  of  the  hobo. 
His  face  showed  two  masks,  one  transparent  and 
passive  and  the  other  tense  and  protesting.  He 
had  ridden  for  thirty-six  hours  in  the  chair  of  a 
day-coach,  without  food  or  sleep,  and  he  was 
walking  to  the  home  of  his  parents  because  he 
lacked  the  necessary  car-fare,  but  these  circum- 
stances were  only  partly  responsible  for  his  air 
of  spectral  weariness.  He  knew  the  stunned 
exhaustion  of  a  man  whose  mind  and  heart  had 
broken  their  questions  against  unfriendly  walls, 
and  at  intervals  he  became  immersed  in  vain 
efforts  to  understand  the  meaning  of  his  wounds. 
During  the  twenty-one  years  of  his  life  he  had 
resembled  an  amateur  actor,  forced  to  play  the 
part  of  a  troubled  scullion  in  a  first  act  that  be- 
wildered and  enraged  him.  At  high-school  he  had 
been  known  as  "the  poet-laureate  of  room  six- 
teen," a  title  invented  by  snickering  pupils,  and 
his  timidly  mystic  lyrics  about  sandpipers,  violets, 
and  the  embracing  glee  of  the  sun,  had  gained  an 
unrestrained  admiration  from  his  English  teach- 
ers. Teachers  of  English  in  American  high-schools 


BLACKGUARD 

are  not  apt  to  insist  upon  originality  and  mental 
alertness  in  expression,  since  their  own  lives  are 
usually  automatic  acceptances  of  a  minor  role,  and 
Carl  became  convinced  that  writing  poetry  was 
only  a  question  of  selecting  some  applauded  poet 
of  the  past  and  imitating  his  verse.  "You  must 
say  the  inspiring  things  that  they  have  said,  but 
see  that  your  words  are  a  little  different  from 
theirs,"  he  said  to  himself,  and  his  words — "a  little 
different" — became  slightly  incongruous  upon  the 
thoughts  and  emotions  of  Tennyson  and  Long- 
fellow, the  latter  two  having  been  selected  because 
they  seemed  easier  to  flatter  than  other  poets  such 
as  Browning  and  Swinburne.  Another  Carl  Fel- 
man  watched  this  proceeding  from  an  inner  dun- 
geon but  lacked  the  courage  to  interrupt  it,  for  to 
a  boy  the  opinions  of  his  teachers,  delivered  with 
an  air  of  weary  authority,  seem  as  inexorable  as 
the  laws  of  the  Talmud  or  the  blazing  sincerity 
of  sunlight.  Carl  was  nearing  seventeen  at  this 
time — a  lonely,  vaguely  rebellious,  anaemic,  dumb- 
ly sullen  boy,  who  tried  in  his  feeble  way  to  caress 
the  life-chains  which  he  did  not  dare  to  break. 
His  parents,  middle-aged  Jews  with  starved  imag- 
inations and  an  anger  at  the  respectable  poverty 
of  their  lives,  looked  upon  his  poetic  desires  with 
mingled  feelings  of  elation  and  uneasiness. 


BLACKGUARD 

The  phenomenon  of  an  adolescent  poet  in  the 
family  is  always  liked  and  distrusted  by  simple 
people — liked  because  it  pleasantly  teases  the 
monotone  of  their  existence,  and  distrusted  be- 
cause they  fear,  without  quite  knowing  why,  that 
it  will  develop  into  a  being  at  variance  with  the 
fundamental  designs  of  their  lives.  Carl's  pa- 
rents clucked  their  tongues  in  puzzled  admiration 
when  he  read  them  one  of  his  poems,  and  then, 
with  a  note  of  loquacious  fear  in  their  voices,  told 
(  him  that  he  must  look  upon  writing  as  a  "side- 
line"— a  pretty,  lightly  smirking  distraction  that 
could  snuggle  into  the  hollows  of  a  business-man's 
life.  Carl,  who  liked  the  importance  of  carrying 
secret  plots  within  him,  did  not  answer  this  sug- 
gestion, or  gave  it  a  sulky  monosyllable,  and  his 
reticence  frightened  his  parents.  The  simple  per- 
son is  reassured  by  garrulity,  even  when  it  attacks 
but  can  derive  nothing  from  silence  save  the  feel- 
ing of  an  unseen  dagger.  The  Felmans  wanted 
their  son  to  attain  the  money  that  had  seduced 
and  eluded  their  longings,  but  deeper  than  that, 
they  yearned  for  him  to  place  a  colored  wreath 
over  the  brows  of  their  tired  imaginations — one 
that  could  convince  them  that  their  lives  had  not 
been  mere  sterile  and  oppressed  bickerings.  The 
father,  a  traveling-salesman  for  a  whiskey-firm, 


BLACKGUARD 

wanted  Carl  to  be  prosperous  and  yet  daring  over 
his  cups  while  the  mother  felt  that  ho  might 
become  a  celestial  notary-public,  placing  his  seal 
upon  the  unnoticed  documents  of  her  virtues. 

Carl  experienced  the  uncertain  dreads  of  a 
dwarf  futilely  attempting  to  squirm  from  a  ring 
of  perspiring  golden  giants  known  to  the  world, 
and  not  even  sure  of  whether  he  ought  to  escape, 
but  knowing  only  that  a  vicious  and  unformed  <! 
ache  within  him  found  little  taste  for  the  flat- 
footed  routines  of  clerk  or  salesman.  Upon 
another  planet  this  initial  writhing  is  doubtless 
offered  the  consolation  of  better  compromises, 
but  the  treadmill  uproars  of  this  earth  merely 
increased  Carl's  feelings  of  shrinking  anger. 

"Oh,  well,  I'll  work  in  a  store  or  sell  something, 
and  make  money.  Life  won't  let  you  do  anything 
else,"  he  said  to  himself.  "But  inside  of  me,  m-m, 
there  I'll  do  as  I  please.  I'll  make  a  country  where 
poets  and  other  begging  men  live  in  little  huts 
on  the  obscure  hills  and  rear  their  families  of 
thoughts  and  emotions,  with  a  haughty  peaceful- 
ness." 

He  shunned  the  people  around  him  as  much  as 
possible,  studying  his  lessons  in  a  precisely  weary 
manner  and  squatting  on  the  grass  of  a  public 
park  near  his  home  where  he  wrote  his  dimly 


BLACKGUARD 

placid  lyrics  to  the  sun  and  moon.  He  had  no 
companions  at  school,  for  the  children  around  him 
were  quick  to  jibe  at  any  remark  of  his  that  con- 
tained a  searching  wraith  of  thought,  and  he  did 
not  join  in  the  school's  minor  activities  because 
of  his  angry  pride  at  the  giggling  accusations  of 
queerness  which  he  received  from  the  other  boys 
and  girls.  They  regarded  him  for  moments  as  an 
enticing  target,  reviling  his  exact  grammar  and 
mild  manners,  but  for  the  most  part  they  paid 
little  heed  to  this  grotesque  atom  lost  in  the  swirl 
of  their  games  and  plans.  In  a  smaller  school 
the  strident  inquisitiveness  of  average  children 
thrown  upon  each  other  might  have  overwhelmed 
him,  but  in  the  immense  city  high-school  he 
managed  effortlessly  to  isolate  himself,  and  the 
children,  once  having  dubbed  him  poet-laureate — 
sarcastically  mimicking  the  phraseology  of  their 
elders — proceeded  to  forget  about  him. 

When  at  length  he  was  graduated,  he  begged 
his  parents  to  send  him  to  college,  desperately 
fighting  for  another  long  period  in  which  he  could 
brush  aside  dry  information  and  rhyme  "earth" 
with  "birth,"  since  he  preferred  the  frolic  of 
misty  promises  to  a  world  of  prearranged  shouts 
and  sweating  dreads.  But  his  parents  felt  that 
their  period  of  uneasy  indulgence  had  inevitably 

6 


BLACKGUARD 

ended,  and  words  trooped  from  them  in  right- 
eously redundant  regiments. 

"You're  a  big  boy  now,  yes,  a  big  boy,  and  you 
know  that  we've  sacrificed  everything  to  give  you 
a  good  education,"  said  Mrs.  Felman.  "Not  that 
we  regret  it,  no  indeed,  we  only  hope  that  it  helps 
you  to  get  along  in  life,  but  this  college  stuff, 
now,  is  a  lot  of  foolishness.  That's  only  for  people 
with  rich  parents,  or  them  that  can  afford  to  go 
a  long  time  without  working;  and  not  only  that, 
but  it  fills  your  head,  you  know,  with  a  lot  of 
nonsense.  It's  time  now  that  you  go  out  and  make 
money  to  help  your  parents.  You  know  that  we're 
just  barely  able  to  get  along  on  what  your  father 
makes.  Not  that  we're  begging  you  for  your  help, 
you  understand,  but  you  should  be  only  too  proud 
to  give  comfort  to  your  parents.  Uncle  Emil  can 
use  a  smart  boy  like  you  in  his  clothing  business 
and  he  told  us  only  the  other  night  that  he'd  give 
you  a  good  job  the  minute  you  come  down.  You've 
got  to  give  up  those  writing  notions  of  yours! 
They  don't  bring  you  in  anything,  and  a  man 
must  go  out  into  the  world  and  make  his  own 
living.  Writing  is  no  business  for  a  strong,  sen- 
sible boy!" 

Carl  listened  with  a  feeling  of  impotent  anger. 
Yes,  they  were  probably  right  in  their  commands 


BLACKGUARD 

and  he  would  be  a  scoundrel  if  he  refused  to  obey 
them  and  rescue  them  from  their  poverty ;  but — 
well,  he  preferred  to  be  a  scoundrel.  "Beyond  a 
doubt  I'm  a  lazy,  ungrateful  wretch,  and  all  that 
I  care  for  is  to  put  words  together — that  seems 
to  relieve  me  somehow — but  say,  how  about  stick- 
ing to  what  I  am?"  he  asked  himself.  "I  know 
perfectly  well  that  I'll  never  change,  and  if  I  make 
a  liar  out  of  the  rest  of  my  life  that  won't  make 
me  any  the  less  guilty.  Besides,  it's  funny,  but  I 
don't  know  whether  I  want  to  change.  There's 
something  satisfactory  about  being  a  scoundrel — 
it  lets  you  do  the  things  that  you  want  to  do; 
while  being  good,  as  far  as  I  can  see,  is  just  pre- 
tending that  you  like  to  do  the  things  that  you 
don't  want  to  do.  Well,  I'm  not  going  to  stand  for 
that!  I've  got  to  choose  between  hurting  my 
parents  and  hurting  myself  and  they  are  going 
to  be  the  victims.  This  will  be  mighty  selfish,  I 
know,  but  I  guess  I'm  a  naturally  selfish  person. 
Anyway,  I  don't  feel  much  love  for  them  and  I 
don't  see  that  it  will  help  them  if  I  try  to  hide 
my  feelings.  They  would  find  out  sooner  or  later 
what  an  inhuman  person  I  am  and  they  might  as 
well  find  out  now." 

Carl  answered  the  verbose  commands  and  advice 
of  his  parents  with  a  mechanical  "yes"  now  and 

8 


BLACKGUARD 

then — a  small  shield  to  protect  the  inner  unfolding 
of  his  thoughts — and  walked  into  his  bedroom, 
where  he  rested  his  dull  broodings  upon  a  pillow. 
The  lives  of  some  men  represent  a  scale  of  gradu- 
ally increasing  compromises  with,  or  victories 
against,  the  forces  surrounding  them,  while  other 
men  crowd  their  decision  into  one  early  moment 
and  walk  swiftly  down  an  unchanging  road.  The 
boy  with  Carl  died  upon  the  bed  in  his  room  and 
the  fumbling,  stiffly  vindictive  beginning  of  a  man 
rose  and  walked  into  the  street,  with  an  evil  smile 
petrifying  the  softness  of  his  face.  In  this  emo- 
tional birth  he  became  to  himself  a  huge  black 
criminal  staggering  beneath  the  weight  of  unre- 
leased  plots,  and  he  derived  an  angry  joy 
from  this  condition,  reveling  in  the  first  guilty 
importance  that  had  invaded  his  meekly  repressed 
Me. 

With  the  inquisitive  grin  of  one  who  is  quite 
convinced  that  he  is  an  embryonic  monster,  he 
arose  at  five  o'clock  on  the  next  morning,  stole 
into  the  bedroom  of  his  sleeping  parents,  pilfered 
fifteen  dollars  from  the  trousers  of  his  father,  and 
took  the  train  to  a  distant  city,  where  he  enlisted 
in  the  United  States  Army.  He  had  first  intended 
to  do  this  at  the  nearest  recruiting  station,  but 
with  the  triumphant  shrewdness  of  a  budding 


BLACKGUARD 

knave  he  decided  that  if  he  joined  the  army  in 
another  city  he  could  more  easily  escape  being 
arrested  for  his  theft.  He  had  robbed  his  parents 
with  an  actually  quivering  delight,  feeling  that 
it  was  the  first  gesture  of  his  attack  upon  an 
unresponsive  world.  In  joining  the  army  he  had 
not  been  lured  by  the  recruiting  poster's  gaudy 
lies  concerning  "adventure,  travel,  and  recreation," 
but  his  reasons  were  more  practical  and  involved. 
He  longed  for  the  stimulus  of  a  physical  motion 
that  would  not  be  concerned  with  the  capture  of 
pennies  and  he  believed  that  he  could  be  more 
alone  with  himself  in  a  new  whirlpool  than  in  the 
drably  protected  alcove  from  which  he  had  fled. 
He  felt  also  that  if  he  were  going  to  prey  upon 
the  world  he  must  make  haste  to  learn  the  tricks 
and  signals  of  a  rogue  and  pay  for  this  knowledge 
with  physical  pain  and  weariness. 

The  details  of  his  army  life  need  not  interfere 
with  this  quickly  sculptured  hint  of  his  birth.  He 
emerged  from  the  lustreless  w^orkshop  of  the  army 
with  the  patient  bitterness  of  one  whose  dreams 
have  become  the  blundering  slaves  of  a  colorless 
reality.  For  some  time  he  wandered  about  the 
country,  in  a  stumbling  dance  with  various  kinds 
(  of  manual  labor — cotton  picking,  wood  chopping, 
factory  work.    At  intervals  he  engaged  in  little 

lO 


BLACKGUARD 

thefts,  such  as  the  money  from  a  drunken  man's 
pockets,  the  purses  of  rooming-house  landladies, 
and  articles  from  the  counters  of  shops,  and  used 
them  for  a  week  or  two  of  leisure  in  which  he 
wrote  of  nightingales  inebriated  with  the  fra- 
grance of  lilac  bushes,  or  dawn  robbing  the  hills 
of  their  favorite  shawl. 

His  role  of  desultory  sneak-thief  failed  to  cause 
within  him  the  slightest  shame  or  self-reproach 
and  he  felt  that  his  longings  were  using  trivial 
weapons  in  a  furtive  manner  merely  to  protect  a 
secretly  delicate  bravery  within  him. 

"I  don't  care  whether  the  world  is  filled  with 
poets  or  not,"  he  sometimes  said  to  himself.  "If 
it  were,  I  might  want  to  be  a  carpenter  or  a  clerk 
then  and  make  that  my  form  of  rebellion.  I  don't 
know.  But  the  world  wants  to  be  filled  with  car- 
penters and  clerks,  and  it's  not  as  fair  as  I  am. 
The  unfairness  makes  me  angry  and  I  strike 
against  it.'  .  .  .  You  must  guard  your  only  reason 
for  living.  All  that  I  want  to  do  is  to  keep  on  "^ 
writing,  and  since  no  one  cares  to  pay  me  for  this 
kind  of  work  I'll  have  to  arrange  for  the  payment 
myself.  When  I  do  hard  work  during  the  day 
I'm  too  tired  to  write  at  night,  and  the  only  way 
in  which  I  can  get  leisure  time  for  writing  is  to 
steal.    If  this  is  evil,  it's  been  forced  upon  me. 

II 


BLACKGUARD 

Of  course,  I'd  much  rather  steal  out  in  the  open, 
but  that  would  instantly  bring  me  to  jail.  No,  this 
complicated  game  known  as  a  world  is  unaware 
of  my  existence  and  I  must  be  equally  absent- 
minded  in  my  own  attitude." 

His  youthful  gesture  of  contorted  cynicism, 
qualified  a  bit  by  the  remaining  ghosts  of  a  naively 
wounded  idealism,  made  him  resolve  to  become 
a  crafty  underdog  —  a  man  who  had  become 
obsessed  with  the  task  of  findmg  his  voice  and 
was  using  every  possible  subterfuge  and  device 
to  protect  this  obsession,  leering  at  the  forces 
that  were  attempting  to  mtrude  upon  his  religious 
concentration.  Right  and  wrong  to  him  were 
unfair  scarecrows  that  slipped  from  the  huge 
indifference  of  his  surroundings  and  demanded 
an  attention  which  they  were  unwilling  to  give 
in  return.  Perhaps  he  was  a  mmor  knave,  seek- 
ing to  rationalize  his  mstmcts  for  crime,  and 
perhaps  he  merely  held  a  naked  determination 
like  that  of  a  certain  immoral  slayer  and  plun- 
derer known  as  Nature.  The  question  is  a  frayed 
one  and  derives  little  benefit  from  the  tensions 
of  exhausted  arguments.  Carl  was  constantly 
harassed  by  a  feeling  of  inarticulate  insignificance, 
and  the  poems  which  he  twisted  from  his  heart, 
on  park  benches  and  in  the  long  weeds  of  ditches 

12 


BLACKGUARD 

beside  railroad  tracks,  were  like  bunches  of 
forget-me-nots  plucked  by  a  dirty,  bewildered 
child  and  thrown  as  offerings  against  the  stone 
breast  of  an  unheeding  giant.  He  still  believed 
that  poetry  was  a  cloak  of  blurred  embroidery 
that  should  be  cast  over  the  shoulders  of  senti- 
ments such  as  love,  faith,  charity,  mercy,  chivalry, 
courage  and  honor,  and  he  felt  both  consoled 
and  amused  at  the  thought  that  he  was  using  a 
rogue  to  guard  within  himself  the  better  man 
that  life  had  not  allowed  him  to  become.  His 
love  for  the  sentiments  which  he  tipped  with 
rhymes  was  partly  caused,  however,  by  the  fear 
that  without  them  he  might  become  too  utterly 
inhuman  for  earthly  survival. 

For  a  year  he  wrestled  with  different  manual 
labors,  and  stole  when  their  perspiring  monotones 
weakened  and  angered  his  desire  to  write  lyrics 
that  were  half  trite  and  half  thinly  wistful,  but 
he  finally  decided  to  return  to  the  midwestern 
city  and  brave  the  reactions  of  his  parents,  whose 
wrathful  letters  had  sometimes  visited  his  jour- 
neys. He  determined  to  rest  awhile  amid  the 
moderate  comforts  of  his  former  home  and  felt 
that  he  could  disarm  the  anger  of  his  parents 
with  a  masterful,   jesting  attitude  that  would 

13 


BLACKGUARD 

muzzle  them.  And  so,  penniless  and  in  dirty 
clothes,  he  was  now  walking  through  the  heavily 
tawdry  business  district  of  a  midwestern  city. 


14 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER   II. 

On  the  streets  martyred  by  crowds,  electric  ' 
lights  pencilled  the  night  with  their  trivial 
appeals,  and  an  ineffectual  approach  to  daylight 
spread  its  desperately  dotted  jest  over  the  scene. 
Since  Carl  almost  never  voiced  his  actual  thoughts 
and  emotions  to  people,  he  grasped,  as  usual,  the 
luxury  of  speaking  to  himself. 

"Electric  light  is  only  the  molten  fear  of  men," 
he  said,  as  he  strode  through  the  unreal  haste 
of  the  crowds.  "Men  are  afraid  to  look  at  the 
night  and  they  have  given  it  eyes  as  stiffly  fright- 
ened as  their  own.  Underneath  the  comforting 
glare  of  this  second  blindness  they  protect  them- 
selves. In  a  dim  light  men  and  women  could  not 
easily  escape  from  each  other,  for  the  darkness 
would  tend  to  press  them  together,  but  in  this 
violent  stare  of  light  they  are  divided  by  a  self- 
assured  indifference.  Watch  them  as  they  stride 
along  with  an  air  of  gigantic,  amusing  importance. 
The  crowd  is  really  a  single  symbol  of  many 
isolations  joined  to  a  huge  one.  It  sees  only 
those  people  who  are  unpleasantly  conscious  of 

15 


BLACKGUARD 

the  electric  glare,  and  who  hurry  through  it  \\'ith 
gestures  of  alert  dislike,  or  with  a  slow  and  morbid 
desire  for  pain." 

This  fancy  made  him  feel  conspicuously  dis- 
robed, and  the  glances  of  passing  people  became 
to  him  flitting  symbols  of  derision  directed  at 
his  beard  and  dirty  clothes.  As  he  looked  up  at 
the  tall,  unlit  office  buildings,  grey  and  narrowly 
vertical,  they  reminded  him  of  coffins  standing 
on  end  and  patiently  waiting  for  a  ci\ilization 
to  crumble,  so  that  they  might  inter  it  and  fall 
to  the  ground  with  their  task  completed.  He 
reached  the  apartment-house  section  in  which  his 
parents  lived — rows  of  three  and  four-story  build- 
ings almost  exactly  like  each  other,  and  standing 
like  factory  boxes  awaiting  shipment,  but  never 
called  for.  In  front  of  each  building  was  a  little, 
square  lawn  hemmed  in  between  the  sidewalk  and 
the  curbstone — tiny  squares  of  dusty  green  lost 
in  a  solved  and  colorless  problem  in  material 
geometry.  Carl  greeted  them  with  a  gesture  of 
ironical  brotherhood  as  he  hurried  along  the  walk, 
while  people,  observing  his  downcast  gaze  and 
saluting  hands,  sometimes  paused  to  doubt  his 
sanity. 

The  glib  suavity  of  a  midsummer  night  sprin- 


i6 


BLACKGUARD 

kled  its  sounds  down  the  street  and  the  doorsteps 
and   walks   were   hea^y   with   men.   women   and 
children,  parading  the  uncomfortable  drabness  of 
their  clothes  and  unwinding  their  idle  talk.     In 
pairs  and  squads,  youths  and  girls  strolled  past 
Carl,  laughing  and  playing  to  that  exact  degree 
of  animal  abandon  tolerated  by  the  street  lights 
of  a  civilization,  and  som.etimes  crossing  the  for- 
bidden boundary  line,  with  little  bursts  of  guilty 
spontaneity.  Amid  the  openness  of  the  street  they 
were  forced  to  become  jauntily  evasive  of  the  old 
sensual  madness  brought  by  a  summer  evening, 
and  they  sought  the  refuges  of  crudely  taunting 
words,    snickering    withdrawals,    and    tentative 
invitations.    They   were   sauntering   toward   the 
kittenish  excitements  of  ice-cream  sundaes,  mov- 
ing pictures,  and  kisses  traded  upon  the  shaded 
benches  in  a  nearby  public  park.    Thought  had 
subsided   in   their  heads   to  a  kindly  mist  that 
clung  to  the  rhythm  of  their  emotions,  though  in 
the  main,  their  minds  were  merely  emotions  that 
vainly  strove  to  become   discreet.     Most  people 
are  incapable  of  actual  thought,  and  thinking  to 
them  is  merely  emotion  that  calmly  plots  for  more 
concrete  rewards  and  visions. 

Carl  looked  upon  the  people  on  the  sidewalks 
with  the  attitude  of  an  unscrupulous  stranger. 


BLACKGUARD 

and  in  his  fancy  he  measured  them  for  material 
gains  and  attacks,  without  a  trace  of  warm  emo- 
tion in  his  regard.  To  him  they  were  merely 
alien  figures  busily  engaged  in  deifying  the  five 
senses,  and  they  mattered  no  more  than  shadowy 
animals  blind  to  his  aims  and  presence.  He  had 
long  since  frozen  his  emotions  in  self-defense  and 
nothing  could  unloosen  them  save  the  timidly 
mystical  lyrics  which  he  wrenched  from  the 
baffled  surfaces  of  his  heart.  During  the  four 
years  of  his  life  as  a  soldier  and  hobo  he  had 
often  looked  upon  some  of  the  darker  and  more 
rawly  naked  shades  of  sexual  desire  in  the  people 
around  him,  but  after  a  first  period  of  mechanical 
curiosity  he  had  drawn  aloof  from  what  he  con- 
sidered a  blind,  shrieking,  fantastic  parade.  "This 
wearisome  game  of  advancing  and  retreating  flesh, 
always  trying  to  lend  importance  to  an  essential 
monotone,  can  go  to  hell,"  he  had  muttered  to 
himself.  "I'll  yield  to  my  sexual  desires  at  rare 
intervals,  but  I'll  do  it  in  the  brief  and  matter- 
of-fact  manner  in  which  a  man  spits  into  a 
convenient  cuspidor."  Women  to  him  were  simply 
moulds  of  dull  intrigue,  irritating  him  with  their 
pretenses  of  animation  and  with  the  oneness  of 
their  appeal. 

As  he  walked  between  the  incongruities  of  hard 

i8 


BLACKGUARD 

street  surfaces  and  soft  noises,  ever5i;hing  around 
him  seemed  to  be  vainly  trying  to  conceal  a  hol- 
low monotone.  Middle-aged  and  old  people  sat 
around  the  doorsteps  of  the  box-like  apartment- 
houses,  and  the  circumscribed  and  hair's-breadth 
shades  of  intelligence  and  defeat  on  their  faces 
were  transparent  over  one  color  and  shape.  Each 
of  these  people  strove  to  convince  himself  that  his 
relaxation  on  this  summer  evening  was  a  glitter- 
ing honor  conferred  by  hours  of  virtuous  toil, 
though  at  times  discontent  suddenly  raised  their 
voices  high  in  the  air.  It  was  as  though  they 
lifted  musical  instruments,  gave  them  one  help- 
less blow,  and  retired  to  apathy,  scarcely  aware  of 
what  they  had  done.  Carl  looked  at  them  with 
a  weary  indifference  that  almost  verged  upon 
hatred,  and  hurried  down  the  cement  walk. 

As  he  neared  the  apartment-house  where  his 
parents  lived  it  suddenly  occurred  to  him  that  the 
entrance  might  be  decorated  by  people  who  would 
recognize  him  and  comment  upon  his  appearance 
and  his  abrupt  return.  The  thought  of  their 
amused  and  veiled  contempt,  or  their  assumption 
of  superior  compassion,  made  him  cringe  a  little 
and  he  turned  to  a  side-street  that  led  to  an  alley 
which  extended  behind  the  block  in  which  his 
parents  lived.    He  passed  through  the  dismal  rear 

19 


BLACKGUARD 

yard  of  beaten  earth  and  ascended  the  wooden 
stairway.  A  negro  janitor,  who  had  been  working 
in  this  place  for  several  years,  gazed  at  him,  at 
first  with  suspicion  and  then  with  a  slowly  pitying 
grin  of  recognition. 

"  'Lo,  Mistah  Felman.  What  brings  you-all 
back  here?" 

Carl  affected  an  irritated  aloof ne^. 

"I  came  back  to  enjoy  a  little  shame,"  he  said. 

"What  dat  last  word  you  said?" 

"Shame,  shame,"  repeated  Carl,  frowning  at 
the  man. 

"Guess  you-all's  crazy,"  said  the  negro,  throw- 
ing up  his  hands  and  stumping  away. 

This  was  one  of  Carl's  favorite  tricks.  When- 
ever he  desired  to  avoid  a  forced  exchange  of 
commonplaces,  or  the  threat  of  a  humiliation,  he 
would  speak  in  a  cryptic  fashion  that  aroused 
bewilderment  or  annoyance  in  the  person  before 
him  and  helped  him  to  end  the  conversation.  He 
found  that  the  rear  door  of  the  apartment  was 
locked  and  knew  that  his  parents  were  visiting  an 
adjacent  moving-picture  theater  or  sitting  outside 
on  the  tiny  lawn.  Happily,  he  eyed  the  open  win- 
dow and  remembered  how  often  in  the  past  his 
mother  had  scolded  his  father  for  that  enormous 
crime.  Ah,  the  windows  in  their  minds  were  well 

20 


BLACKGUARD 

nailed  and  shaded.  He  felt  relieved  at  the  knowl- 
edge that  he  could  probably  sit  for  an  hour  or  two 
and  rest  before  they  returned.  He  climbed 
through  the  window  with  the  jocose  satisfaction 
of  a  criminal  whose  mock-hanging  has  been  post- 
poned, and  sat  on  a  weak- jointed  rocking-chair  in 
the  small  dining-room. 

Not  a  fraction  of  change  had  come  to  the  clut- 
tered dullness  of  the  room.  He  saw  the  same 
rickety  table  of  round  oak,  where  an  inferior  circle 
was  displaying  with  mild  pride  an  embroidered 
square  of  white  linen;  the  modest  and  orderly 
showing  of  cut-glass  and  silverware — ^tinsel  of  an 
old  defeat — ;  the  plaster-of-paris  bust  of  an 
Indian,  violently  colored  and  bearing  an  artificial 
scowl ;  the  mantlepiece  that  held  a  little  squatting 
Chinaman  made  of  colored  lead  and  the  bric-a- 
brac  effigy  of  a  doll-like  courtier  in  washed  out 
pinks  and  blues.  On  the  wall  opposite  him  a  brass 
clock,  moulded  into  crude  cherubs  intertwined  with 
stiff  blossoms,  busily  spoke  of  itself,  forgetful  of 
the  time  that  it  was  supposed  to  measure,  and  lit- 
tle prints  of  uncertain  landscapes  hung  in  golden 
frames  upon  the  wall-paper  that  was  stamped  with 
heavy  purple  grapes  against  a  tan  background. 
Carl  shuddered  as  though  he  were  in  the  midst  of 

21 


BLACKGUARD 

a  weak  and  disorganized  nightmare,  in  which  real- 
ity was  indulging  in  a  hackneyed  burlesque  at  its 
own  expense,  and  he  crashed  his  fist  upon  the  oak, 
table. 

"Damn  it,  I'll  get  out  of  this  some  day,"  he 
shouted,  craving  the  sharp  relief  of  sound,  and 
then  he  grinned  at  the  clumsy  futility  of  his  explo- 
sion. 

"If  you  ever  do  manage  to  escape  from  this  con- 
spiracy of  barren  peace  and  flat  lies  it  won't  be 
with  angry  noise,"  he  said  to  himself.  "A  vicious 
calmness  will  help  you  more." 

He  extracted  a  soiled  roll  of  pencilled,  smudged 
papers  from  an  inside  pocket  of  his  coat  and 
stroked  them  as  though  they  were  a  gathering  of 
living  presences.  The  paper  became  smooth  skin 
to  him  and  he  questioned  it  with  his  fingers.  This 
reaction  was  not  a  sensual  one  but  sprang  from  his 
longing  for  a  reality  that  had  so  far  eluded  his 
consciousness.  His  poems,  peeping  with  eyes  of 
fanciful  promises  above  the  veils  that  redeemed 
their  faces,  were  more  concrete  to  him  than  actual 
flesh  and  breath. 


22 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    III. 

He  sat  in  the  rocking-chair,  tired  and  vaguely 
oppressed,  clutching  the  paper  in  the  manner  of 
one  who  clings  to  a  tangible  encouragement  in 
the  midst  of  fantastic  lies  and  fists.  His  parents 
came  into  the  room  at  l^st  and  turned  on  an  elec- 
tric light  without  at  first  noticing  him  in  the  semi- 
gloom^.  Turning,  his  mother  saw  him  in  the  chair. 
Her  hands  flew  to  her  breast,  in  two  tight  slants, 
as  she  impulsively  pictured  the  presence  of  a 
bearded  burglar,  and  then  she  recognized  him  and 
insulted  her  emotions  with  a  cross  between  a  gasp 
and  a  squawk. 

"It's  Carl!  Carl!  For  God's  sake,  v/hen  did 
you  come  in?" 

"About  an  hour  ago,  through  the  window  that 
father  always  leaves  open,"  said  Carl,  waiting 
with  a  poised  and  resigned  smile  for  the  inevitable 
cannonade. 

His  father  came  in  from  the  kitchen,  where  he 
had  gone  for  a  drink  of  water.  Seeing  Carl,  he 
slowly  challenged  him  with  sleepily  prominent 
eyes. 

23 


BLACKGUARD 

"S-o-o,  s-o!  You're  back  here  again,"  he  said. 
**I  always  said  that  you  would  come  back.  I  knew 
you  would  get  tired  of  bumming  around.  I  knew 
it.  Well,  you  loafer,  what  do  you  want  from  us 
now?  Some  more  money  out  of  my  pants-pockets, 
maybe  ?  You're  a  son  that  I  should  be  proud  of ; 
oh,  yes !" 

"Yes,  and  a  fine  condition  he  comes  back  in," 
said  Mrs.  Felman,  who  was  beginning  to  be  angry 
at  herself  because  she  was  not  quite  as  wrathful 
at  Carl  as  she  felt  that  she  should  have  been.  A 
louder  voice  might  supply  this  missing  intensity. 
"A  fine  condition!  Look,  will  you,  at  his  shoes, 
and  his  clothes,  and  the  beard  on  his  face.  A  nice 
specimen  to  be  trotting  back  to  his  parents  after 
four  years!  When  he  needs  us  he  comes  back, 
oh,  sure,  but  we  wasn't  good  enough  for  him 
when  he  ran  away  and  stole  our  money.  We 
should  tell  him  to  go  right  back  where  he  came 
from.    Right  back!" 

She  sat  down  with  an  air  of  stifled  indignation 
that  strained  in  its  effort  to  capture  an  actual 
condition,  and  with  many  gasping  words  she  tried 
to  piece  together  the  image  of  an  inexplicable 
reptile.  She  was  a  woman  whose  emotions, 
garrulously  bitter  because  of  the  material  strait- 
jackets  in  which  they  had  writhed  for  years,  were 

24 


BLACKGUARD 

ever  determined  to  exalt  their  bondage,  if  only 
to  win  relief  from  pain.  Carl  had  always  been 
an  evil  enigma  to  her,  one  that  was  at  times  half 
guessed — the  accusing  finger  of  her  youth,  some- 
times barely  discerned  through  the  mist  of  lost 
desires.  To  escape  these  momentary  exposures 
she  had  often  swung  the  blindness  of  an  anger 
that  was  directed  as  much  at  herself  as  at  Carl. 
The  father,  however,  had  obliterated  his  past  self 
with  a  more  jovial  carelessness  and  had  stolen 
the  consoling  fumes  of  many  taverns,  so  that  he 
felt  little  need  for  the  shrouds  of  loud  noise. 

"Well,  at  least  you  showed  good  sense  in  coming 
through  the  back  way,"  he  said,  looking  at  his 
son  with  a  mixture  of  wonder  and  humorous  con- 
tempt. "You  would  have  made  a  fine  sight  for 
the  neighbors  on  the  front  steps !  We  would  never 
have  heard  the  last  of  it.  Noo,  noo,  what  did  you 
come  back  for?  If  it's  just  to  play  your  old  tricks 
again,  you  can  walk  right  out  of  here,  I  tell  you. 
I'll  stand  for  no  more  nonsense  from  you.  Turn 
over  a  new  leaf  and  you're  welcome  here,  but  no 
more  of  your  writing,  and  fancy  talk,  and  high 
notions!" 

"Look  at  him,"  said  MrsT  Felman.  "Sits  there 
like  a  piece  of  wood!  Have  you  nothing  to  say 
for  yourself?   Why,  you  haven't  told  us  how-do- 

25 


BLACKGUARD 

you-do.    Inhuman!    I  don't  see  how  I  ever  gave 
birth  to  such  a  creature  as  you." 

Carl  had  been  sitting  like  a  stone  figure,  dressed 
by  the  playful  passerby  known  as  Life  and  yet 
absolutely  void  of  life.  His  mute  indifference  had 
seduced  all  suggestions  of  flesh  from  him  and 
even  his  blonde  beard  and  hair  seemed  pasted 
upon  an  effigy.  Finally  the  clever  semblance  of 
emotion  returned  to  his  body  and  sent  an  experi- 
mental tremble  to  see  whether  the  flesh  was 
prepared  to  receive  another  animated  disguise. 
His  hands  twitched  as  though  they  were  striving 
to  overcome  their  paralysis  in  an  effort  to  obey 
some  powerful  signal.  As  he  listened  to  the  jerky 
tirades  of  his  parents — sterility  seeking  to  regain 
a  fertility  by  the  use  of  a  staccato  voice — part 
of  him  wanted  to  cringe  and  win  the  convulsive 
shield  of  tears,  while  another  part  longed  to  bound 
from  the  insipid,  brittle  room  and  glide  aimlessly 
into  the  night.  The  cringing  mountebank,  unfairly 
aided  by  physical  fatigue,  won  this  inner  skirmish, 
and  Carl  decided  to  silence  the  anger  of  his  parents 
by  speaking  to  them  in  a  way  that  would  make 
them  bewildered,  since  bewilderment  is  but  a  shade 
removed  from  frightened  respect.  It  was  the  only 
pitiful  little  stunt  that  could  offer  him  a  small 
respite  from  the  poverties  of  noise  that  were 

26 


BLACKGUARD 

assailing  him — the  favorite  purchase  of  Indian 
medicine-men,  Druid  priests,  circus  barkers  and 
other  childlike  charlatans. 

"You  see,  the  situation  has  been  complicated," 
he  answered  slowly,  with  the  voice  of  a  loftily- 
enervated  teacher.  "Complicated.  I  have  tried 
to  save  a  possible  poet  from  death — always  a 
noble  but  redundant  proceeding  —  but  it  seems 
that  his  skin  must  burn.  I've  come  back  now 
to  make  his  coffin  and  stud  it  with  gold.  Gold 
would  seem  to  be  a  favorite  metal  of  yours,  my 
dear  parents.  Surely  you  will  be  satisfied  now. 
And  it  is  also  possible  that  you  may  help  me  with 
the  funeral  arrangements,  since  this  burial,  unlike 
plebeian  ones,  may  extend  over  several  years. 
And  what  else  do  you  want  me  to  say?  I  have 
so  many  acrobatic  words  and  they  would  love  to 
perform  for  you,  but  I  am  tired  to-night.  True, 
I  am  a  rascal.  Can  you  forget  that  embarrassing 
challenge  for  one  evening?" 

He  broke  his  stonelike  repose  into  one  forward 
motion  as  he  leaned  toward  his  parents,  turning 
upon  them  the  prominently  somnolent  eyes  that 
had  been  the  sole  gift  from  his  father's  face,  and 
smiling  like  an  exhausted  but  lightly  poised  angel. 
His  parents  were  stunned,  for  their  indignant 
assurance  had  suddenly  recoiled  from  an  unex- 

27 


BLACKGUARD 

pected,  blank  wall.  They  could  not  quite  under- 
stand his  words  and  yet  they  felt  that  he  was 
mocking  them.  The  gracious  glibness  of  his  voice 
dwarfed  them  with  the  mystery  of  its  meanings. 
This  monster  was  not  ashamed  of  himself — what 
could  it  signify?  But,  after  all,  it  was  rather 
difficult  to  be  angry  at  a  man  when  you  were  not 
quite  sure  whether  his  words  were  flattering  or 
sneers.  Carl  rose  abruptly  from  the  chair.  Now 
he  controlled  the  situation  for  a  time.  He  kissed 
his  mother's  forehead  lightly  and  smiled  at  his 
father. 

"I'm  tired  and  hungry,"  he  said.  "A  little  food 
and  sleep  will  fix  me  up,  though,  and  to-morrow 
I'll  look  for  work  of  some  kind." 

"Crazy,  crazy,  just  like  he  always  was,"  said 
his  father,  turning  away  with  a  partly  appeased 
and  patient  manner.  After  all,  one  must  give  the 
proper  blend  of  pity  and  tolerance  to  one  who  is 
truly  insane. 

The  face  of  his  mother  held  a  virtuous  impa- 
tience that  made  her  large  nose  go  up  and  down 
like  a  see-saw,  and  on  the  see-saw  a  dash  of 
reluctant  tenderness  rode. 

"I'll  get  you  something  from  the  ice-box,"  she 
said.  "You're  still  so  young — twenty-two  you'll 
be  next  week — and  we  may  yet  live  to  be  proud 

28 


BLACKGUARD 

of  you.  If  you'll  only  get  rid  of  your  funny 
writing  notions  and  your  stealing  ideas.  My  God, 
what  a  combination!" 

Afterwards,  as  Carl  ate,  they  sat  at  the  kitchen 
table  with  him.  Mrs.  Felman  was  tall  and  strong, 
with  a  body  on  which  plumpness  and  angles  met 
in  a  transfigured  prizefight  of  lines.  The  long 
narrowness  of  her  face  was  captured  by  a  steep 
nose  slightly  hooked  at  the  top  and  her  thin  lips 
were  not  unlike  the  relics  of  a  triumphant  sneer. 
Even  when  they  tried  to  be  satisfied  they  never 
quite  lost  their  expression  of  tight  gloating. 
Above  her  high  cheek-bones  her  eyes  were  bitter 
tensions  of  light,  and  a  remnant  of  greyish-brown 
hair  receded  from  the  moderate  and  indented  rise 
of  her  forehead.  Her  skin,  once  pink,  was  now 
roughly  florid,  like  a  petal  on  which  many  boots 
have  been  scraped  and  cleaned.  Mr.  Felman  was 
her  violent  refutation.  Short  and  hampered  by 
plumpness,  the  large  roundness  of  his  face  held 
the  smirking  emphasis  of  a  greyish-red  mous- 
tache, huge  and  clipped  at  the  ends.  His  thick 
lips  blossomed  uncompromisingly  over  his  fair 
double  chin,  and  his  low  forehead,  madly  scratched 
by  a  plowman,  stood  between  the  abrupt  curve 
of  his  small  nose  and  a  ruff  of  dark  red  hair 
pestered  by  grey.     An  expression  of  carelessly 

39 


BLACKGUARD 

earthly  humor,  banqueting  on  shallowness,  fitted 
snugly  upon  his  face  and  only  his  eyes,  bulging 
with  sleep,  brought  a  metaphysical  contradiction. 
He  watched  his  son  with  a  lazy,  half -curious  pity. 

"Noo,  what  have  you  been  doing  all  this  time?" 
he  asked. 

"I  left  the  army  a  year  ago.  You  know,  I  wrote 
to  you  then  and  found  out  that  you  still  lived 
here.  That  was  very  kind  of  me,  I'm  sure.  Since 
then  I've  knocked  about  in  different  towns.  Sleep 
and  work,  work  and  sleep — the  twin  brothers  of 
man's  inadequacy." 

"Ye-es,  still  using  long  words,  the  twin  brothers 
of  something  or  other,"  said  Mrs.  Felman,  with  a 
light  disapproval.  "Learn  to  talk  and  act  like 
other  people  and  you'll  be  better  off.  I  used  to 
think  a  little  different  when  I  was  young,  but 
believe  me,  you  can't  get  along  by  just  dreaming 
and  talking  to  yourself.  The  trouble  with  you  is 
that  you  got  a  lot  of  fancy  words  and  no  get-up." 

"Philosophical  discourse  number  sixty-two," 
answered  Carl,  in  the  drowsily  chanting  voice  of 
a  train  announcer.  "Or  have  I  lost  count  of  them  ? 
Your  life  hasn't  made  you  very  happy,  mother, 
and  perhaps  that's  why  your  arguments  are  lack- 
ing in  the  swagger  of  conviction.    Or  perhaps  you 


30 


BLACKGUARD 

think  that  it's  best  to  be  unhappy,  and  in  that 
case  I  agree  with  you." 

"Well,  I  wouldn't  lower  myself  by  trying  to 
argue  with  you,"  said  Mrs.  Felman.  "I'm  per- 
fectly right  in  everything  I  say,  but  I  simply 
don't  know  how  to  fiddle  with  words  like  you  do." 

"Have  you  still  got  those  poetry  ideas  in  your 
head?"  asked  Mr.  Felman.  "Poetry  is  no  business 
for  a  strong,  grownup  man.  It's  a  lot  of  foolish- 
ness good  for  women  and  children!" 

"If  you  could  write  things  that  make  money 
now,"  said  Mrs.  Felman.  "Why,  only  the  other 
day  Mrs.  Benjamin  was  telling  me  she  has  a 
cousin  who  writes  love  stories  for  the  Daily 
Gazette.  Nice  stories  that  make  you  laugh  and 
cry.  And  this  girl  gets  twenty  dollars  apiece  for 
them,  too." 

"Now,  now,  don't  be  trying  to  encourage  him 
again,"  said  Mr.  Felman.  "Ain't  we  had  enough 
trouble  over  this  writing  of  his  ?  Let  him  go  out 
and  get  a  regular  job,  like  other  men!" 

Carl  laughed,  and  his  laugh  was  like  an  emotion 
interviewed  by  carbolic  acid,  and  his  parents  eyed 
him  with  an  offended  surprise. 

"Still  squabbling  over  the  bones,"  he  said,  with 
a  sarcastic  apathy.  "If  you  were  more  delicate 
you  might  realize  that  it  is  inappropriate  to  argue 

31 


BLACKGUARD 

at  a  funeral.  I'm  only  a  tongue-tied  fool,  but  I 
seem  very  elusively  inarticulate  to  you  because 
you're  even  more  tongue-tied.  And  now,  as  usual, 
you  haven't  understood  a  word  of  what  I've  said." 

"Well,  you  don't  have  to  laugh  at  your  parents," 
said  Mrs.  Felman,  with  an  air  of  pin-pricked 
dignity.  "iTou  never  did  show  any  respect  for  us, 
in  spite  of  all  that  we've  done  for  you.    Never." 

"Say,  Carrie,  you'll  have  to  get  a  suit  for  him. 
Something  cheap,  you  know,  at  Pearlman's,"  said 
the  father.  "He'll  never  get  a  job  in  those  rags 
of  his." 

"Money,  money,"  said  Mrs.  Felman  in  a  mechan- 
ically mournful  voice.  "All  I  do  is  spend  money. 
It's  terrible." 

The  sound  of  an  opening  door  invaded  the  flat 
tom-tom  of  their  talk. 

"It's  Al  Levy,"  said  Mrs.  Felman,  with  fear  in 
her  voice.  "It  would  be  a  shame  now  if  he  saw 
Carl  in  this  condition.  Hurry,  hurry,  Carl,  to  the 
bathroom  before  he  comes  in  here.  Your  father's 
razor  is  on  the  shelf  and  I'll  get  you  a  clean  shirt 
from  the  ones  you  left  behind.  Maybe  they  still 
fit  you,  as  I  was  always  careful  to  buy  them  a 
size  too  large." 

Carl  felt  like  an  ignoble  marionette  who  was 
being  hastily  mended  behind  the  curtain  for  fear 

f 
32 


BLACKGUARD 

that  he  might  cast  ridicule  upon  the  sleekly- 
vacant  play,  and  his  emotions  were  evenly  divided 
between  amusement  and  contempt.  Driving  his 
heart  and  mind  into  a  fitting  blankness,  he  closed 
the  bathroom  door.  Levy  had  a  room  in  the 
Felman  apartment  and  they  treated  him  with 
an  unctuous  respect  that  almost  verged  upon 
an  Oriental  self-abasement.  He  was  a  man  of 
twenty-six  who  worked  for  a  wealthy  uncle, 
received  a  large  salary,  and  polished  and  scrubbed 
the  limited  essentials  of  a  semi-professional  man- 
about-town,  with  minor  chorus  girls  and  gamblers 
helping  him  to  flatter  microscopically  the  fatigue 
donated  by  his  daily  labors. 

"Be  very  friendly  to  Al,  please,"  said  Mrs.  Fel- 
man, as  they  all  sat  around  the  dining-room  table. 
"He's  a  very  smart  man — works  in  the  mail-order 
business,  selling  cheap  jewelry  to  country  people, 
and  makes  a  pile  of  money.  His  seven  dollars  a 
week  come  in  mighty  handy  to  us,  I  can  tell  you." 

"Dammit,  all  business  is  going  good  except 
whiskey,"  said  Mr.  Felman,  as  though  he  were 
inviting  an  elusive  conspiracy  to  share  the  firm- 
ness of  his  tones.  "These  prohibition  fanatics  are 
ruining  everything.  The  saloon-keepers  are  all 
afraid  they're  gonna  be  closed  up,  and  they  won't 
buy.    I  haven't  sold  a  barrel  in  two  days.    I  don't 

33 


BLACKGUARD 

know  what  the  world's  coming  to  with  all  these 
here  prohibitions  People  are  entirely  too  busy 
telling  each  other  what  to  do,  and  nobody  minds 
his  own  business  any  more.  .  .  .  Well,  anyway, 
Carl,  there's  still  sample  bottles  for  you  to  swipe 
from  my  overcoat  pockets." 

He  said  the  last  words  with  a  bearish  joviality, 
and  had  the  expression  of  a  bear  who  has  paddled 
to  within  a  mile  of  irony  and  is  sniffing  at  the 
singular  realm. 

"Sol,  don't  remind  me  of  his  old  wildness,"  said 
Mrs.  Felman,  with  a  peevish  dread.  "I  still 
remember  the  time  when  he  staggered  along  the 
sidewalk  in  front  of  all  the  neighbors.  Is  there 
anything  bad  that  he  hasn't  done,  I  want  to 
know?" 

One  evening,  just  before  running  away  from 
home,  Carl  had  taken  some  tiny  bottles  of  whiskey 
from  his  father's  overcoat,  without  curiosity,  but 
longing  for  the  feeling  of  sly  self-assurance  that 
had  balanced  his  blood  from  former  sneaking  sips. 
He  had  repaired  with  the  bottles  to  a  neighboring 
public  park  and  emptied  them  in  swiftly  nervous 
gulps,  enjoying  the  vastly  kinglike  sneer  at  the 
world  which  had  brushed  aside  his  melancholy 
uncertainties. 

"I  am  a  poet!"  he  had  cried  out  to  the  mur- 

34 


BLACKGUARD 

muring  patience  of  the  trees  around  him,  "and 
fools  will  some  day  gape  along  my  road,  and  the 
open  circles  of  their  mouths  will  be  like  the  rims 
of  beggars'  cups.  My  voice  will  rise  above  the 
dreamless  clink  of  their  coins  and  they  will  stop 
and  look  at  me,  as  though  I  were  a  pilgrim- 
problem.  An  angry  amazement  will  lend  its  little 
catastrophe  to  their  faces.  Yes,  I  will  drop  beauty 
to  them,  in  clearly  abundant  handfuls,  and  they 
will  sit  quarreling  over  its  value  and  tossing  me 
an  occasional  penny.  But  I  will  never  stop  to 
join  their  discourses.  My  feet  will  be  lighter  than 
breezes  and  more  direct.  I  am  a  poet,  and  the 
world  is  stagnation  that  I  must  ever  torment !" 

He  had  lurched  back  to  the  Felman  apartment, 
"dropping  beauty"  with  an  incisive  exuberance  to 
the  astonished  neighbors  seated  around  the  door- 
step, and  commanding  them  to  examine  his  gifts. 
As  he  sat  at  the  dining-room  table  now,  he  remem- 
bered this  episode,  and  similar  ones,  with  a  gust 
of  half-rebellious  shame. 

"This  has  been  my  only  triumph  so  far — a 
whiskey  bottle  raised  beneath  the  stars,  on  a 
summer  evening,  and  reigning  over  an  idle  riot 
of  words,"  he  said  to  himself  with  an  exhausted 
self-hatred.  "Am  I  going  to  be  contented  with 
this  thwarted  joke?   And  yet " 

35 


BLACKGUARD 

Levy  stepped  into  the  room  and  provided  a 
slightly  unwelcome  ending  to  this  secret  sentence. 
Short  and  slender,  his  blue  serge  suit  clinging  to 
him  like  an  emblem  of  shrewd  victory,  he  made 
an  excellent  period  to  the  labors  of  thought.  Upon 
his  small,  light  tan  face  a  twirled-up  black  mous- 
tache curved  to  a  diminutive  swagger  and  his 
bending  nose  seemed  to  be  vainly  attempting  to 
caress  the  moustache — an  unnecessary  affirmation. 
His  black  eyes  incessantly  drove  little  bargains 
beneath  the  shine  of  his  black  hair. 

"H'llo,  folks,"  he  chirruped,  smiling  with  an 
automatic  ease  at  the  Felmans.  Then  he  noticed 
Carl  and  looked  at  him  with  polite  surprise. 

The  father  and  mother  regarded  each  other 
with  a  despondent  indecision,  dreading  the 
thought  of  introducing  their  drolly  disreputable 
son  to  this  shining  symbol  of  an  outside  world 
and  hating  the  undeserved  appearance  of  inferior- 
ity which  had  been  thrown  upon  them.  This  queer 
son  had  cast  his  shadow  upon  their  assured  and 
humbly  conservative  position  in  life — in  a  world 
of  decently  balanced  regularities.  Their  ability  at 
loquacious  pretense  took  up  the  burden  with  a 
weary  precision. 

"This  is  my  son  Carl,"  said  Mr.  Felman,  with 
a  prodigiously  uneasy  grin  tickling  the  roundness 

36 


BLACKGUARD 

of  his  face.  "Carl,  this  is  Al  Levy.  You've  heard 
us  talking  of  him,  Al.  He's  just  come  back  from 
the  army — surprised  his  old  parents,  you  know." 

"Glad  to  meet  you,  I'm  sure,"  said  Levy,  with 
an  expert  affability  beneath  which  he  exercised 
his  disdain  for  Carl's  patched-up  appearance  and 
his  inkling  of  the  actual  situation. 

He  complimented  a  chair  at  the  table  briskly; 
or,  in  other  words,  he  sat  down,  employing  a  great 
condescension  of  limbs.  He  and  Felman  began  an 
uncouth  debate  concerning  the  respective  selling 
merits  of  whiskey  and  cheap  jewelry,  while  Carl 
listened,  bored  and  a  little  sick  at  the  stomach. 
Words  to  these  men  were  crudely  unveiled  mis-  ? 
tresses,  selling  their  favors  for  whatever  hasty 
coin  might  be  thrown  on  the  table.  Levy  turned 
to  Carl. 

"How  did  you  like  the  army?"  he  asked,  with 
a  lightly  superior  kindliness, 

Carl  nervously  wondered  what  he  should  answer 
and  bickered  with  his  desire  to  return  a  curt 
indifference  to  this  vaguely  garnished  mannikin. 
He  decided  to  annoy  the  limited  mind  of  the  man 
in  front  of  him  and  take  a  comforting  wraith  of 
revenge  from  this  result — his  customary  device 
for  such  situations,  always  used  to  evade  a  lan- 
guage which  he  did  not  care  to  simulate.    The 

37 


BLACKGUARD 

physical  nearness  of  people  made  him  snarl,  for 
then  his  imagination  found  it  more  difficult  to 
trifle  with  their  outlines,  and  he  would  strive  to 
drive  them  away  with  insult. 

"The  army  is  a  colorless  workshop,  where  men 
can  forget  their  past  and  avoid  gambling  with 
their  future,"  he  said,  in  an  aloofly  professorial 
voice.  "All  of  the  hurried  and  obedient  move- 
ments of  a  day  in  the  army,  like  a  little  drove  of 
dazed  foxes,  prevent  a  man  from  fully  realizing 
his  own  insignificance,  and  at  night  there  is 
always  a  nearby  city  in  which  the  sorrowful 
illusion  can  be  captured  again.  Oh,  yes,  the  army 
is  an  excellent  prison  for  men  to  whom  life  holds 
a  fixed  horizon — men  whose  hearts  and  minds 
have  reduced  curiosity  to  an  ashen  foothold." 

Levy's  brows  bent  to  an  unfamiliar  process  and 
perplexity  slowly  loosened  his  lips,  but  a  feeling 
of  irritated  pride  made  him  determined  not  to 
show  his  confusion  to  one  whom  he  looked  upon 
as  a  demented  and  windy  subordinate.  He  knew 
that  this  "fancy  fool"  was  attempting  to  parade 
a  superior  knowledge  of  English,  thus  creating  a 
counterfeit  of  wisdom. 

"Oh,  I  don't  think  that  the  army  is  as  bad  as 
all  that,"  he  said,  in  a  glibly  hurried  voice,  trying 
to  assume  an  attitude  of  careless  disagreement. 

38 


BLACKGUARD 

"I  was  a  sergeant-major  once  in  the  National 
Guard,  down  in  Tennessee,  and  we  had  a  pretty- 
good  time  of  it,  I'll  tell  you.  It  gave  us  all  a 
splendid  muscle  and  fine  appetite,  and  it  taught 
us  to  obey  the  commands  of  our  superior  officers 
without  hesitating.  You  know,  in  life  you've  got  ■ , 
to  follow  the  orders  of  someone  who  knows  / 
more  than  you  do,  or  you'll  never  get  anywhere. 
Besides,  we  had  a  lot  of  intelligent  men  in  our 
outfit.  Why,  my  company  commander  was  one 
of  the  best  lawyers  in  Nashville." 

"My  planet  is  somewhat  distant  from  yours.  I 
was  barely  able  to  hear  you,"  said  Carl,  amusedly. 
"Still,  that  doesn't  mean  that  either  of  us  is 
better  or  worse  than  the  other.  Your  eyes  are 
contented  with  what  they  see  and  mine  are  not. 
But  it  would  not  be  very  important  to  tell  you 
of  things  that  you  have  never  missed." 

Levy  became  involved  in  his  cigarette  smoking 
while  he  futilely  asked  his  mind  for  an  adequate 
and  unconcerned  retort.  Mrs.  Felman  sensed  his 
annoyance  and  felt  hugely  angry  at  her  son  for 
"not  getting  in  right"  with  this  splendid  young 
business-man  and  for  speaking  in  a  manner  that 
was  mysteriously  and  trivially  vexing. 

"Ach,  Carl  always  talks  just  like  a  hero  in  aT 
story,"  she  said,  in  an  agitated  effort  at  humorous  > 

39 


BLACKGUARD 

masquerade  and  hoping  to  smooth  over  the  errors 
made  by  her  freakish  son.  "Don't  pay  no  attention 
to  him.    I  can  never  understand  him  myself." 

Levy,  once  more  completely  the  successful  man 
to  his  own  vision,  forgot  the  bite  of  the  beetle,  and 
turned  to  the  elder  Felman. 

"How  about  a  little  game  of  rummy?" 

"Carrie,  get  the  cards,"  Felman  answered,  in 
quick  tones  of  bright  relief.  "Carl  will  play — he 
always  was  a  rummy  shark  and  he  never  changes 
in  anything.  Such  a  stubborn  boy!  I  bet  you 
that  forty  years  from  now  he'll  be  just  as  foolish 
as  he  ever  was." 

"Your  optimism  concerning  the  length  of  my 
life  intrigues  me,"  said  Carl. 

Ten-cent  pieces  were  placed  on  the  table  and 
the  cards  were  shuffled.  To  the  other  two  men 
the  card  game  would  have  lacked  interest  without 
the  money  to  be  battled  for,  not  because  of  the 
tiny  gain  involved,  but  because  their  desires  for 
relaxation  were  lacking  in  spontaneity  and  needed 
the  pettily  deliberate  strokes  of  a  familiar  whip 
to  encourage  their  birth.  Whenever,  on  rare  occa- 
sions, they  romped  upon  some  lawn,  tossing  a  ball 
to  a  child,  or  read  the  lurid  clumsinesses  of  some 
magazine,  they  showed  a  sheepish  hesitation  and 
hazily   felt  that  they   were   wasting  time  that 

40 


BLACKGUARD    • 

belonged  to  the  shrewd  importance  of  barter  and 
exchange.    The  presence  of  a  coin  upon  a  table, 
however,  held  a  glint  of  the  missing  coquette. 
They  swore  elaborately  and  interminably  at  lost 
hands — "that  queen  would  have  given  it  to  me" 
—flung  down  the  paper  oblongs  with  a  tense  ela- 
tion when  they  were  winning,  and  enjoyed  the 
presence  of  a  milder  but  still  keen  market-place. 
The  gambling  instinct  is  never  anything  more 
than  the  desire  to  seduce  an  artificial  uncertainty 
from  a  life  that  has  grown  mildewed  and  pre- 
arranged—  the  monotone  must  be  circumvented 
with  little,  straining  devices.     It  pleased  Carl  to 
imitate  the  motions  of  the  other  two  men,  out- 
witting them  at  their  own  small  game  while  still 
remaining  a  repulsed  bystander,  and  sneaking  a 
morsel  of  enjoyment  from  their  genuine  dismay 
at  some  defeat.     After  several  games  had  been 
played  the  father  yawned  mightily,  creating  a 
noise  that  sounded  like  a  Mississippi  River  steam- 
boat whistle  heard  at  a  distance,  poignant  and 
full-throated.     Perhaps  with  this  yawn  his  soul 
signaled  a  complaint  against  the  disgrace  which 
this  day  had  cast  upon  it — a  nightly  remonstrance 
unheard  by  his  mind  and  heart.     Levy,  subdued 
and  impressed  by   Carl's  card-playing  abilities, 
pelted  him  with  commonplaces  which  he  tried  to 

41 


BLACKGUARD 

make  as  genial  as  possible,  and  Carl,  too  sleepy 
to  be  belligerent  or  aloof,  gave  him  softly  vague 
responses.  Mrs.  Felman,  for  the  first  time,  looked 
out  with  heavy  peace  from  behind  the  crinkling 
newspaper  where  she  had  been  placidly  nibbling 
at  the  perfumed  logics  of  a  latest  divorce  scandal. 
Her  son  had  finally  redeemed  the  evening  by 
exhibiting  a  small  but  ordinary  proficiency  which 
drew  him  a  little  nearer  to  the  dully  efficient  level 
of  mankind,  and  her  reflections  upon  his  material 
future  became  a  shade  less  hopeless. 


42 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    IV. 

At  an  early  hour  on  the  following  morning  she 
hurried  Carl  to  the  business  section  of  the  city 
so  that  the  neighboring  women,  who  slept  late 
after  getting  breakfast  for  their  men,  would  not 
see  him  from  their  windows,  and  at  a  department 
store  she  purchased  a  cheap  suit  of  clothes  for 
him.  He  dressed  behind  a  small  screen  in  the 
store,  feeling  like  a  small,  eccentric  lamb  who  was 
being  glossed  for  the  market.  She  left  him  at  an 
elevated  railroad  station,  extracting  a  dollar  from 
her  pocketbook  with  an  air  of  intensely  solemn 
and  reflective  importance. 

"Don't  waste  it  now;  I  know  your  tricks,"  she 
said.  "Be  sure  and  get  the  afternoon  paper  and 
look  through  the  want  ads.  Take  anything  at  the 
start — don't  be  high-toned." 

Carl  gave  her  the  necessary  monosyllables  of 
assent  and  walked  down  the  street,  his  mind  busy 
with  many  insinuations. 

"Perhaps  I'd  better  stop  stealing  for  a  while," 
he  said  to  himself.  "If  I  keep  it  up  without  an 
intermission  it's  going  to  land  me  in  jail  again 

43 


BLACKGUARD 

and  I'm  not  anxious  for  that  circumscribed  trav- 
esty to  happen.  That  term  of  three  months  in 
Texas  gave  me  a  great  deal  of  time  in  which  to 
write,  but  the  little  animals  in  that  place  intruded 
with  a  bite  that  was  both  wistful  and  inadequate. 
It's  a  little  difficult  to  write  about  beauty  and 
scratch  your  skin  simultaneously — the  proud  stare 
of  the  former  does  not  like  to  sit  in  the  prison 
of  a  small  irritation.  It  is  an  intricately  adjusted 
equilibrium  and  the  lunge  of  a  finger  nail  can 
desecrate  this  subtly  balanced  aloofness.  There 
is  little  difference  between  the  bars  of  mind  and 
actual  iron  rods,  but  when  you  are  still  partly 
inarticulate,  physical  motion  can  become  a  neces- 
sary recompense.  No,  for  the  time  being  I  had 
better  strain  my  hands  in  prayer  against  the  tiny 
implements  with  which  men  felicitate  their  stupid- 
ity. Back  and  forth — but  what  else  can  I  do?" 
It  was  his  habit  to  think  only  in  metaphors  and 
V  '  similes,  and  in  this  way  he  evaded  the  realities 
that  would  otherwise  have  crushed  him.  He 
walked  down  the  street,  practicing  an  emotion  of 
stolid  submission,  and  this  surface  humility 
played  pranks  with  his  blonde-topped  head  and 
made  his  thin  lips  loosely  unrelated  to  the  rest 
of  his  face.  As  he  strode  through  the  business 
district  of  the  city,  with  its  sun-steeped  frenzies 

44 


BLACKGUARD 

of  men  and  vehicles,  the  scene  pressed  upon  him 
and  yet  was  remote  at  the  same  time.  It  was  as 
though  he  were  studying  a  feverishly  capering 
unreality  and  vainly  striving  to  persuade  himself 
that  he  formed  a  significant  part  of  it. 

The  unrelenting  roar  of  automobiles,  wagons 
and  cars  became  the  laughable  and  inarticulate 
attempt  of  a  dream  to  convince  him  that  it  held 
a  power  over  his  mind  and  body.  Men  and  women 
darted  past  him  with  a  rapidity  that  made  them 
appear  to  be  the  mere  figments  of  a  magic  trick. 
Here  he  caught  the  thick  tension  of  lips,  and 
there  the  abstracted  flash  of  eyes,  but  they  were 
gone  before  he  could  believe  that  they  had  inter- 
fered with  his  vision.  He  paused  beside  a  dark 
green  news-stand  squeezed  under  the  iron  slant 
of  an  elevated-railroad  stairway  and  strove  to  pin 
the  scene  to  his  mind  and  fix  his  relation  to  the 
people  who  were  jesting  with  his  eyes.  Young  and 
old,  dressed  in  complications  of  timidly  colored 
cloth,  each  seemed  to  be  running  an  exquisitely 
senseless  race  in  the  effort  to  gain  a  nonsensical 
foot  on  the  other  person.  The  masked  rush  of 
their  bodies  deprived  them  of  a  divided  sexual 
appearance  and  lure — men  and  women,  touching 
elbows  without  emotion,  were  swept  into  one 
lustreless  sex  which  darted  in  pursuit  of  a  treach- 

4S 


BLACKGUARD 

erously  invisible  reward.  The  entire  structure 
around  them — buildings,  signs,  and  iron  slabs — 
stood  like  a  house  of  cards  carefully  supported  by 
an  essence  that  rose  from  the  rushing  people,  and 
Carl  felt  that  if  these  men  and  women  were  to 
become  silent  and  motionless,  in  unison,  the  house 
of  cards  would  instantly  lose  its  meaning  and 
tumble  down. 

"What  are  they  gliding  and  stumbling  toward  ?" 
he  asked  himself — the  old,  poignantly  futile  first 
question  of  youth.  "Each  man,  with  an  ingenious 
treason,  is  trying  to  forget  his  inability  at  self- 
expression  and  soiling  the  void  with  an  increasing 
burden  that  will  prevent  him  from  complaining  too 
much.  At  some  time  in  their  lives  all  of  these 
people  felt,  dimly  or  strongly,  for  a  moment  or 
for  years,  the  ludicrous  ache  of  a  desire  to  stand 
out  clearly  against  their  scene,  but  the  loaded 
momentum  of  past  lives — the  choked  influence  of 
past  futilities — pushed  them  along  with  a  force 
which  they  could  not  withstand.  It  is  really  a 
stream  of  adroitly  dead  men  and  women  that  is 
fleeing  down  this  street  —  surreptitiously  dead 
people  living  in  the  bodies  of  a  present  reality  and 
perpetuating  the  defeated  essence  of  their  past 
lives." 

As  he  stood  and  watched  the  crowd  he  found  it 

46 


BLACKGUARD 

necessary  to  ask  himself  the  words:  "What  gave 
its  slyly  amused  signal  for  this  plaintive  race 
through  the  centuries?" 

He  also  found  it  necessary  to  answer:  "A 
languid  idiot,  much  in  need  of  consolation, 
refuses  to  abandon  his  dream." 

Here  and  there,  apart  from  the  main  lunge  of 
the  crowd,  were  men  and  women,  standing  still, 
as  though  motion  had  betrayed  them,  or  loitering 
in  a  carelessly  placid  fashion.  Vacancy  and  inde- 
cision tampered  with  most  of  their  faces. 

"How  many  minor  poets  have  stood  upon  these 
street  corners,  making  arrangements  for  a  gradual 
and  unnoticed  death  ?"  he  asked  himself,  with  the 
sentimental  self-importance  of  youth. 

But  the  stage  hands  clamored  that  he  was  neg- 
lecting the  play — a  habit  falsely  known  as  laziness 
— and  that,  with  appropriate  cunning,  they  had 
erected  this  city  scene  so  that  he  and  hordes  of 
others  should  find  it  difficult  to  forget  their  tamely 
borrowed  lines.  With  an  uncomplaining  wrench 
he  returned  to  his  surface  role  of  a  youth  sent 
out  in  weakly  gruesome  clothes  to  look  for  some 
task  that  would  begin  to  answer  the  flatly  strident 
requests  of  an  average  life.  The  humble  stupor 
fell  back  upon  his  shoulders  and  he  walked  to  a 
bench  in  a  public  square,  seated  himself,  and  read 

47 


BLACKGUARD 

the  "want-ad"  section  of  a  newspaper.  He  spied, 
with  a  prostrate  frown,  the  barren  jest  of: 
"Wanted — Young  man  for  clerical  work ;  must  be 
neat,  industrious,  wide-awake,  sober,  well  edu- 
cated, reliable,  good  at  details,  ambitious,  honest, 
painstaking;  salary  twelve  dollars  a  week."  He 
muttered  certain  useless  words  to  himself.  "The 
illusion  of  a  reluctant  penny  for  fresh  vigor.  If 
the  applicant  is  morbidly  patient  and  reasonably 
deft  at  following  orders  he  may  after  many  years 
attain  the  virtue  of  writing  the  same  trivially 
unfair  appeal  to  other  men.  And  even  that 
exquisite  victory  is  uncertain." 

He  saw  that  as  usual  his  only  choice  rested 
between  an  office-boy's  task,  dignified  by  the  title 
of  junior  clerk  to  make  it  more  enticing,  and 
unskilled  manual  labor. 

"Now,  how  will  you  become  tired — mentally  or 
physically?"  he  asked  himself  with  great  for- 
mality. 

Abruptly,  and  in  that  conscious  and  secret  plot 
which  men  insist  upon  calling  subconscious,  he 
peered  at  the  picture  of  a  black  man  and  a  white 
man  throwing  a  wilted  rose  back  and  forth  to 
each  other  and  catching  it  without  a  trace  of 
emotion.  The  little,  ridiculous  rose  lost  a  petal 
after  each  catch,  but  in  spite  of  its  smallness 

48 


BLACKGUARD 

the  number  of  petals  seemed  to  be  inexhaustible. 
At  a  distance  the  black  and  white  man  exactly 
resembled  each  other,  but  on  approaching  closer 
it  could  be  seen  that  the  black  man  held  the  face 
of  an  incredibly  stolid  ruffian,  while  the  white 
man's  face  was  engraved  with  the  patience  of  a 
cowed  child.  Not  being  acquainted  with  psycho- 
analysis—  that  blind  exaggeration  of  sexual 
routines — Carl  did  not  believe,  after  he  returned 
to  the  touch  of  the  park  bench,  that  this  picture 
had  slyly  veiled  the  direction  of  his  physical 
desires.  He  knew  that  a  fantastic  whim  had 
slipped  from  his  mind  and  induced  him  to  probe, 
his  choice  between  two  equally  drab  kinds  of 
labor,  striving  to  make  this  choice  endurable  for 
a  moment. 

He  selected  three  advertisements,  all  of  them 
asking  for  manual  laborers,  walked  from  the  park, 
and  boarded  a  street  car.  The  first  place  that  he 
visited  was  a  box  factory — a  slate-colored  crate 
of  a  building,  bearing  that  flatly  unexpectant  tone 
that  expresses  the  year-long  mating  of  smoke  and 
dirt.  As  he  ascended  the  gloomy  stairway  an 
endless  drone  and  clatter  battled  with  his  ears. 
It  seemed  a  senseless  blasphemy  directed  at  noth- 
ing in  particular — the  complaint  of  a  dull-witted, 
harnessed  giant  who  was  being  driven  on  without 

49 


BLACKGUARD 

knowing  why.  Carl  entered  a  huge  room  dishev- 
eled with  sawdust  and  shavings  and  cluttered  with 
black  belts  and  wheels.  Men  with  swarthy, 
motionless  faces  and  feverish  arms  leaned  over  the 
wheels  and  saws.  As  he  stood  near  the  doorway, 
feeling  dwarfed  and  uncertain,  a  man  came  toward 
him.  Sturdy  and  short,  the  man  looked  like  a 
magnified  and  absent-minded  gnome,  too  busy  to 
realize  that  civilization  had  played  an  obscene 
trick  on  him  by  stealing  his  fairy  disguise  and 
substituting  the  colorless  inanities  of  overalls  and 
a  black  shirt.  The  large  and  heavily  twisted  fea- 
tures on  his  face  were  partially  hidden  by  a  brown 
stubble  of  beard,  and  like  all  men  who  work  for- 
ever in  factories,  he  had  an  ageless  air  in  which 
youth,  middle  age  and  old  age  were  pounded  into 
one  dull  evasion. 

"What  d'ya  want?"  he  asked,  the  words  jumbled 
to  a  bark. 

"I'm  looking  for  work.  Saw  your  ad  in  the 
paper." 

He  examined  the  region  between  Carl's  toes  and 
cap,  measuring  the  unimportance  of  flesh. 

"We  want  good  strong  men  to  load  boxes  and 
carry  lumber,"  he  said.  "You  don't  look  like  a 
man  for  the  job,  bo.  You're  dressed  like  a  travelin' 


50 


BLACKGUARD 

salesman  an'  we  want  men  who  ain't  afraid  to 
get  dirt  on  their  clothes.    Get  me?" 

"Don't  mind  this  suit  of  mine,"  said  Carl.  "I 
have  a  much  dirtier  one  at  home  and  I'll  be  only 
too  glad  to  wear  it  here.  You  see,  I  always  feel 
more  peaceful  in  dirty  clothes,  but  someone  played 
a  joke  on  me  and  made  me  wear  this  suit." 

"Well,  you  ought  to  come  ready  for  work,  if 
you're  lookin'  for  it" — the  man  peered  again  at 
Carl. 

"Nope.  Nope.  You  ain't  got  the  build  for 
heavy  work.  We're  after  big,  husky  men.  Sorry, 
Jack,  but  there's  nothin'  doin'." 

"Say,  be  reasonable,"  said  Carl.  "Fve  done  hard 
work  off  and  on  for  the  last  four  years  and  I'm 
much  stronger  than  I  look.  Come  on,  give  me  a 
chance." 

The  man  shook  his  head  as  his  eyes  received 
Carl's  slender  arms  and  narrow  shoulders,  and  he 
did  not  know  that  this  weak  aspect  concealed  an 
inhuman  amount  of  endurance.  After  another 
useless  expostulation  Carl  walked  out,  grinning 
forlornly  as  he  strode  down  the  street.  Cheated 
out  of  the  phantom  opiate  of  a  beautiful  box- 
piling  job  because  of  a  deceptive  physical  appear- 
ance and  a  twenty-dollar  suit,  reduced  to  nineteen 
through  the  expert  pleading  of  his  mother!     He 

51 


BLACKGUARD 

looked  down  with  delicate  aversion  at  the  grey, 
neatly-pressed  cloth  which  concealed  his  material 
humility  with  lines  of  dreamless  confidence,  and 
felt  a  sudden  impulse  to  tear  it  off  and  go  nakedly 
cavorting  down  the  street,  taking  the  cries  of 
onlookers  as  a  suitable  reward,  but  that  sleek 
caution  born  from  rough  faces  and  rougher 
hands  chided  him  back  to  sanity.  After  calling  at 
another  factory  and  receiving  the  same  refusal, 
he  decided  to  wait  until  the  morrow,  when  he 
could  don  his  old,  dirty  clothes  and  avert  sus- 
picion. 

The  city  turmoil  was  slackening,  like  a  huge, 
human  top  beginning  to  spin  weakly.  The  warm 
hardness  of  a  summer  evening  between  city 
streets  tried  a  little  laughter  in  an  unpracticed 
voice,  and  revolving  streams  of  men  and  women 
hid  the  pavements — a  satiated  army  returning 
from  an  unsettled  conflict.  The  scene  was  a  mixed 
metaphor  trying  to  straighten  itself  out.  Feeling 
forlornly  alert  and  useless  in  the  midst  of  all  this 
important  exhaustion,  Carl  made  his  way  home. 

A  group  of  neighbors  sat  with  a  clean  and 
well-brushed  peace  around  the  doorstep.  In  the 
heat  of  the  summer  evening  they  seemed  mere 
figures  of  slightly  animated  flesh,  with  their 
thoughts  and  emotions  reduced  to  placidly  con- 

53 


BLACKGUARD 

tented  wraiths.  Three  middle-aged  Jewish  women 
sat  in  rocking  chairs  and  knitted  with  an  effortless 
incision,  unaware  of  the  spiritual  prominence  that 
is  usually  discovered  in  their  race.  Their  bulky- 
bodies  censured  the  lightness  of  evening  air  and 
their  deeply-marked  brown  faces  were  those  of 
self-assured,  thoughtless  queens  issuing  orders  to 
a  tiny  domain,  with  palmetto  fans  for  scepters  and 
rhinestone  combs  for  crowns.  Incessantly  they 
chatted  about  the  personal  details  of  their  daily 
lives,  splitting  these  details  into  even  smaller 
atoms  and  fondling  the  minute  particles  with  a 
lazy  relish.  Children  romped  at  their  feet  or 
brought  some  tiny  request  to  their  laps — children 
that  seemed  to  be  dreams  of  cherubic  hilarity, 
released  from  the  busy  sleep  of  the  middle-aged 
women  and  reproving  it.  Behind  them,  sitting 
on  the  stone  steps,  a  middle-aged  Jewish  man 
glued  his  depressed  weariness  to  a  newspaper. 
The  orderly  sleekness  of  his  clothes  had  met  with 
the  familiarity  of  a  summer  day  and  the  rim  of 
his  once  stiff  collar,  drenched  with  perspiration, 
made  a  pathetic  curve  around  his  fat,  brown  neck. 
His  eyes  were  like  fiat  discs  of  metal  placed  on 
each  side  of  an  enormous,  confident  nose.  Noses 
express  the  spirit  of  people  far  better  than  lips 
and  eyes,  for  they  cannot  be  moved  and  changed 

53 


BLACKGUARD 

to  suit  the  fears  and  desires  of  a  person,  but 
stand  with  an  outline  of  uncompromising  reveal- 
ment.  Their  still  silence  is  often  the  only  sincerity 
upon  a  human  face,  and  the  nose  of  this  man 
showed  a  strident  green  that  was  contradicted  a 
bit  by  the  drooping  little  indentations  just  above 
the  nostrils,  indicating  that  the  man  had  his 
moments  of  self-doubt,  but  refused  to  yield  to 
them. 

It  seemed  incredible  to  Carl  that  these  people 
were  housing  hearts  and  minds,  for  he  could  see 
them  only  as  so  many  sterile  lumps  of  flesh  that 
were  using  every  desperate  trick  to  minimize  the 
crawling  shadow  of  their  unimportant  graves. 
Two  of  the  women  knew  him  and  greeted  him 
with  an  insincere  and  inquisitive  cordiality. 

"Wh-y-y,  Mister  Felman,  when  did  you  get 
back?"  said  Mrs.  Rosenthal,  the  fattest  of  the 
group. 

"I  returned  yesterday,"  answered  Carl,  injecting 
a  great  solemnity  into  his  voice. 

"Yesterday?  Well,  well.  And  did  you  have  a 
nice  time  in  the  army?  I've  been  told  that  it's 
really  marvelous  for  a  man — makes  him  so  strong 
and  healthy.  And  then  all  the  traveling  about, 
you  know,  must  be  so  interesting." 

"Oh,  ye-e-es,  it's  a  wonderful  place,"  said  Carl, 

54 


BLACKGUARD 

gravely  mimicking  her  drawling  voice.  "Bands, 
and  uniforms,  and  parades.  It's  really  quite  fasci- 
nating." 

"Well,  I'm  so  glad  you  liked  it,"  said  Mrs.  Ben- 
jamin, another  woman  in  the  group,  who  felt  that 
it  was  time  to  advance  a  well-placed  sentence.  "I 
want  you  to  meet  my  husband.  Mo,  this  is  Mister 
Felman,  who's  just  come  back  from  the  army." 

"Glad  t'  meet  yuh,"  said  the  man  on  the  door- 
step, blurring  the  words  in  a  swiftly  mechanical 
fashion,  but  looking  very  closely  at  Carl. 

Carl  returned  the  salutation  in  the  same  fashion, 
taking  a  shade  of  amusement  from  his  parrot- 
like impulse.  These  hollow  creatures — what  else 
could  one  do  save  to  imitate  their  mannerisms  and 
ideas,  for  self-protection,  and  rob  and  defraud 
them  at  every  opportunity,  thus  giving  them  a 
mild  apology  for  existence?  After  another  round 
of  wary  commonplaces  he  managed  to  break  away. 
His  mother  met  him  at  the  door  and  he  said 
"Hello"  and  was  about  to  pass  her  when  her  sharp 
voice  halted  him. 

"You  haven't  got  an  ounce  of  affection  in  you! 
A  nice  way  to  greet  your  mother!  Hello,  and  he 
walks  right  by  like  I  was  some  boy  he  met  on  the 
street." 

For  a  moment  Carl  stood  without  answering. 

55 


BLACKGUARD 

This  woman  who  had  given  birth  to  him — an 
incomprehensible  chuckle  of  an  incident — was 
almost  non-existent  to  his  emotions — a  mere 
shadow  that  held  an  incongruously  raucous  voice 
and  guarded  one  of  the  gates  of  his  surface  prison. 
As  he  stood  in  the  hallway,  doubting  the  reality 
of  her  shrill  voice,  he  asked  himself:  "Am  I  an 
inhuman  monster,  unfit  to  touch  this  woman's 
dress,  or  am  I  a  poet  standing  with  candid  erect- 
ness  in  an  alien  situation  ?" 

Suddenly  the  question  became  unimportant  to 
him  and  he  felt  that  he  had  merely  offered  his 
inevitable  self  the  choice  between  an  imaginary 
halo  and  an  equally  fantastic  strait- jacket.  If  his 
mother  actually  longed  for  an  affection  which  he 
did  not  hold,  it  would  be  inexpensive  to  toss  her 
the  counterfeit  coins  of  gestures  and  words.  When 
she  finished  her  staccato  diatribe,  he  bowed  deeply 
to  her,  with  the  palm  of  one  hand  lightly  interro- 
gating the  buttons  of  his  coat,  raised  her  hand 
to  his  lips,  and  kissed  it  at  great  length. 

"Na-a,  go  away  with  your  silliness,"  she  said. 
"I  know  you  don't  mean  it." 

Her  narrow  face  loosened  for  a  moment  and  a 
shimmer  of  compensation  found  her  eyes.  This 
queer  son  of  hers  might  be  faintly  realizing,  after 
all,  the  unselfish  intensity  of  her  efforts  to  give 

56 


BLACKGUARD 

him  a  position  of  honor  and  respectability  in  the 
world.  Perhaps  he  was  only  wild  and  young,  and 
would  finally  press  his  shoulders  against  the 
admired  harness  of  material  success.  It  could  not 
be  possible  that  one  who  had  struggled  from  her 
flesh  would  remain  a  remote  idiot  and  ignore  the 
warm  shrewdness  within  her  that  life  had  some- 
how swindled. 

The  elder  Felman  was  reading  his  paper  in  the 
dining-room.  He  greeted  Carl  with  a  somnolent 
imitation  of  interest,  but  the  heat,  aided  by  a 
day  spent  in  pungent  saloons,  had  cheated  him 
of  most  of  his  mental  consciousness.  He  had 
Decome  so  thoroughly  accustomed  to  drink  that 
an  artificial  buoyancy  scarcely  ever  invaded  the 
dull  ending  of  his  days. 

"We-e-ell,  where  did  you  go  to-day?"  he  asked, 
feeling  some  slight  craving  for  sound  and  trying 
to  rouse  his  material  anticipations. 

He  abandoned  his  seductive  newspaper,  with  its 
melodrama  that  was  pleasant  because  it  murdered 
at  a  distance,  and  questioned  Carl  with  his  sleepy 
eyes. 

"Went  to  a  couple  of  factories,  but  the  foremen 
were  disgusted  with  the  cut  of  my  clothes,"  said 
Carl.  "They  felt  that  the  wearing  of  a  new  and 
unwrinkled  suit  revealed  an  intelligence  which 

57 


BLACKGUARD 

should  not  be  possessed  by  an  applicant  for  manual 
labor.  I  tried  to  convince  them  that  the  semblance 
was  false  in  my  case,  but  they  refused  to  be 
persuaded." 

"Always  trying  to  joke.  That  won't  get  you 
anything.  The  main  thing  is — did  you  get  work, 
or  didn't  you?" 

"No,  I  did  not.  I  applied  for  manual  labor,  but 
I  forgot  to  put  on  overalls." 

Mrs.  Felman  stood  in  the  doorway  and  lifted  a 
skillet  in  simple  wrath. 

"Factories  he  goes  to !"  she  cried,  in  a  voice  that 
was  not  unlike  the  previous  rattling  of  the  skillet. 
"I  bought  him  a  new  suit  and  shoes  this  morning 
so  he  could  look  for  common,  dirty  work!  It's 
terrible.  Here  we  sent  him  to  high-school  for 
four  years  and  his  only  ambition  is  to  work  as  a 
common  laborer." 

The  father  smiled  dubiously  at  her  explosion. 

"Now,  Carrie,  don't  let  all  the  neighbors  know 
your  business,"  he  said.  "Your  holler  is  enough 
to  drive  anyone  crazy.  There's  no  harm  in  honest 
work,  Carrie,  and  besides  he'll  soon  get  tired  of 
sweating  in  factories  and  look  for  something 
decent.    Don't  worry." 

"I  guess  anything  will  be  better  than  that  silly 
scribbling  that's  ruined  his  life  so  far,"  said  Mrs. 

58 


BLACKGUARD 

Felman,  her  anger  dwindling  to  a  guttural  sulki- 
ness.  Carl,  who  had  been  sitting  with  a  suffering 
grin  on  his  face,  gave  them  soothing  words  and 
once  more  held  them  at  arm's  length. 


59 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER   V. 

In  the  dirty  clothes  that  he  had  worn  upon  his 
arrival,  qualified  by  a  clean  shirt,  he  went  forth 
on  the  next  morning  and  found  work  as  a  line- 
man's helper  for  a  telephone  company.  He  was 
required  to  climb  up  the  wooden  poles ;  hand  tools 
to  the  lineman ;  unwind  huge  spools  of  wire ;  make 
simple  repairs  under  the  lineman's  guidance. 
As  he  labored  from  pole  to  pole,  down  a  suburban 
street,  taking  the  impersonal  whip  of  the  sun  and 
winning  the  pricks  of  insects  on  his  sweat-dappled 
face,  he  felt  dully  grateful  toward  the  physical 
orders  that  were  crudely  obliterating  the  con- 
fused demands  of  his  heart  and  mind.  As  he 
toiled  on,  this  dull  feeling  gradually  rose  to  a  self- 
lacerating  joy.  He  revelled  in  the  cheap  vexa- 
tions brought  by  his  tasks — the  unpleasant  scrap- 
ing of  shins  against  iron  rungs  and  the  sting  of 
dust  in  his  eyes — and  his  self-hatred  stood  apart, 
delightedly  watching  the  slavish  antics  of  the 
physical  mannikin. 

Then,  when  this  emotion  paused  to  catch  its 
breath  it  was  replaced  by  a  calmer  one,  and  his 

60 


BLACKGUARD 

insignificance  receded  a  bit,  beneath  the  substan- 
tial lure  of  arms  and  legs  that  were  moving 
toward  a  fixed  purpose.  "I  am  doing  something 
definite  now  and  that  is  at  least  a  shade  better 
than  the  indefinite  uselessness  of  my  thoughts," 
he  mumbled  to  himself  as  he  lurched  from  pole 
to  pole.  The  slowly  mounting  ache  of  his  muscles 
became  a  bitter  hint  of  approaching  peace  and 
he  looked  forward  to  the  moment  when  he  would 
quit  his  labors  and  enjoy  the  returning  inde- 
pendence of  his  body,  as  though  it  were  a  god's 
condescension.  He  worked  quickly  and  breath- 
lessly, as  one  who  hurries  to  a  distant  lover's 
arms.  Filled  with  a  doggedly  naive  hatred  for 
his  own  deficiencies,  he  welcomed  this  chance 
to  insult  them  with  disagreeable  and  infinitely 
humble  postures,  and  he  gladly  punished  him- 
self underneath  the  violence  of  the  sun.  It  was, 
indeed,  a  spiritual  sadism  deigning  to  make  use 
of  the  flesh. 

"Hey,  Jack,  take  it  a  little  easier,"  the  lineman 
called  down  to  him  once.  "Don't  kill  yourself  at 
this  job.     It's  too  damned  hot  to  work  hard." 

Carl  gave  him  a  beaten  grin  and  moved  his 
arms  even  faster  while  the  lineman  bewilderedly 
meditated  upon  this  imbecility.  The  lineman  was 
a  burly  young  Swede  with  a  broadly  upturned 

6i 


BLACKGUARD 

nose  and  thickly  wide  lips.  His  face  suggested 
poorly  carved  wood.  The  blankness  of  his  mind 
held  few  skirmishes  with  thought  on  this  rasping 
afternoon  and  his  mental  images  were  confined 
to  tools,  stray  glasses  of  beer,  yielding  pillows, 
and  feminine  contours — the  flitting  promises  that 
held  him  to  his  day  of  toil.  He  possessed  no 
human  significance  to  Carl — he  was  a  drably  acci- 
dental automaton  who  shouted  down  the  blessed 
orders  that  gave  Carl  little  time  for  definite 
thoughts  and  emotions:  an  unconscious  helper  in 
the  flogging  of  mind  and  soul. 

As  they  walked  down  the  street  after  the  day's 
work  Carl  looked  closely  at  him  for  the  first  time. 
Sweat  and  dirt  were  violating  the  youthful  out- 
lines of  his  face,  and  his  small  blue  eyes  were 
contracted  and  deeply  sunk  as  though  still  direct- 
ing the  movements  of  his  arms.  The  blunt 
strength  of  his  body  sagged  beneath  the  color- 
lessness  of  clothes  and  his  head  was  wearily  bent 
forward — the  grey  frenzies  of  a  civilization  had 
exacted  their  daily  tribute  and  it  is  possible  that 
he  was  not  aware  of  the  glory  and  impressiveness 
which  certain  poets  find  in  his  cringing  role.  For 
a  time  Carl  looked  at  him  with  an  exhausted 
friendliness  and  felt  tied  to  him  by  the  intimate 

62 


BLACKGUARD 

bonds  of  confessing  sweat  and  conquered  toil,  and 
this  illusion  did  not  vanish  until  he  spoke. 

"Me  for  beer  and  somethin'  to  eat,"  he  said, 
with  heavy  anticipation.  "A  day  shust  like  this '11 
take  the  guts  outa  any  man.  Come  along,  Jack, 
I'll  stand  treat  for  the  suds.  .  .  .  An'  say,  lemme 
give  ya  a  tip — don't  overwork  yourself  out  on 
this  job.  It  don't  pay.  You  won't  get  a  cent 
more  at  the  end  of  the  week.  Do  whatcha  gotta 
do  but  take  it  kinda  easy.  Kinda  easy.  The  boss 
is  too  busy  most  of  the  time  to  notice  who's  doin' 
the  most  work  an'  unless  you  loaf  on  the  job  you 
can  get  by  without  killin'  yourself." 

The  complacent  roughness  of  his  voice,  divided 
by  the  shallow  wisdoms  of  the  underdog,  destroyed 
the  feeling  of  tired  communion  which  Carl  had 
been  sheltering,  and  his  exhaustion  began  to  creep 
apart  from  the  man,  like  a  tottering  aristocrat. 
He  was  once  more  a  proudly  baffled  creator,  shuf- 
fling along  after  a  day  of  useless  movements,  and 
his  hatred  for  human  beings  awoke  from  its  short 
sleep  and  brandished  a  sneer  on  his  loose  and  dirt- 
streaked  face. 

He  walked  into  a  corner  saloon  with  Petersen 
and  gulped  down  a  glass  of  beer.  Its  cool  interior 
kiss  aroused  a  bit  of  vigor  within  him  and  he 
looked  around  at  the  men  who  were  amiably  fight- 

63 


BLACKGUARD 

ing  to  place  their  elbows  on  the  imitation  mahog- 
any bar.  Their  faces  were  relaxed  and  soiled, 
heavily  betraying  the  aftermath  of  a  day  of  toil, 
and  an  expression  of  brief  elation  teased  their 
faces  as  they  swallowed  the  beer  and  whiskey  and 
licked  their  lips.  After  each  drink  they  stood  with 
blustering  indecision,  like  generals  striving  to  for- 
get a  menial  dream  and  regain  their  command  of 
an  army,  or  quietly  tried  to  erase  the  blunders  and 
supplications  of  a  day,  seeking  nothing  save  the 
solace  of  lazy  conversation  and  weakly  clownish 
arguments.  The  strained,  corrupt  clamor  of 
voices  debating  over  women,  prize-fighters,  and 
money  swayed  back  and  forth  and  was  timidly 
disputed  by  the  whir  of  electric-fans  and  the  clink 
of  glasses.  A  wave  of  sleepy  carelessness  stormed 
Carl  as  he  watched  these  men.  Inevitably  thrown 
in  with  them,  as  a  sacrifice  to  a  dubious  reality, 
he  felt  inclined  to  copy  their  actions  and  inanely 
insult  his  actual  self,  since  at  this  moment  all 
words  and  gestures  seemed  equally  futile  to  him. 
"What  essential  difference  is  there  between  a 
poet,  boasting  of  his  reputation,  and  a  workman 
bragging  about  the  women  who  have  allowed  him 
to  molest  their  bodies  ?"  he  asked  himself,  forcing 
the  question  out  of  the  drained  limpness  of  his 
mind.    "The  poet  has  taught  better  manners  to 

64 


BLACKGUARD 

his  vanity,  with  many  an  inquisitive  artifice, 
while  the  other  man  is  more  natural  and  clumsy." 

Petersen's  voice  interrupted  the  soliloquy. 

"Come  on,  have  another." 

"Make  it  whiskey  this  time,"  said  Carl  to  the 
bartender.     "I'll  pay  for  this  one,  Petersen." 

"Keep  your  money,  keep  it,"  answered  Petersen, 
warmed  by  his  beers  to  an  insistent  generosity. 
"I  got  plenty  of  it.  But  say,  I'll  be  a  little  shorter 
in  kale  tuhnight  when  Katie  gets  through  with 
me.  There's  no  way  of  spendin'  money  that  that 
dame  don't  know,  but  I  guess  all  women  are  like 
that.  They  make  you  fly  some  to  get  'em.  Gonna 
meet  her  at  eight  tonight." 

"Who's  Katie?"  asked  Carl,  drowsily  amused 
after  his  whiskey. 

"She's  a  little  brunette  I'm  goin'  with.  I'm 
blonde  myself  so  I  like  'em  dark  an'  well-built. 
Fine-lookin'  girl  she  is.  Some  curve!  She  ain't  a 
fast  dame  by  no  means  but  I  give  her  money  so's 
she  can  look  decent.  You  know  the  wages  they 
pay  at  them  damn  department-stores!  I  don't 
wanna  be  ashamed  of  her  when  I  take  her  out  so 
I  get  her  the  best  of  every  thin' — silk  stockings, 
nice  hat,  swell  shoes." 

"Don't  she  feel  kinda  small  about  a  man  paying 

65 


BLACKGUARD 

for  her  clothes?"  asked  Carl,  slipping  into  Peter- 
sen's language. 

"Well,  she  said  no  at  first  but  I  told  her  that 
she  didn't  have  to  give  me  nothin'  except  what 
she  wanted  to,"  said  Petersen.  "I'm  a  straight 
guy  with  women,  I  am." 

"Do  you  love  her?"  asked  Carl,  wondering  how 
Petersen  would  take  the  question. 

He  looked  at  Carl  with  a  heavy  disapproval. 

"Say,  cut  out  the  kiddin',"  he  answered.  "D'ya 
lo-o-ove  her" — he  mimicked  the  words  with  aston- 
ished derision — "none  of  that  soft  stuff  for  me. 
She's  a  good-lookin',  wise  girl,  and  if  I  don't  see 
anyone  I  like  better  I'll  prob'ly  marry  her,  but 
she  ain't  got  no  ropes  tied  to  me.  You  bet  not! 
There's  plenty  of  fish  in  the  pond.  Jack." 

"Yes,  if  you've  got  the  right  kind  of  bait," 
answered  Carl,  deliberately  falling  into  the  other 
man's  verbal  stride,  "but  be  sure  that  someone  else 
isn't  fishing  for  you  at  the  same  time.  Hooked 
from  above,  while  not  watching,  you  know." 

"You're  a  regular  kidder,  ain't  ya,"  said  Peter- 
sen, who  dimly  felt  that  Carl  was  masking  the  sly 
wisdom  of  sexual  pursuits  and  respected  him  for 
it.  "But  say,  Katie's  got  a  nice  friend — Lucy's 
her  name.    She's  a  little  thin,  not  much  curve  to 

66 


BLACKGUARD 

her,  but  some  men  like  'em  that  way.  An'  she's 
kinda  quiet  too,  don't  talk  much,  but  I  don't  care 
for  them  when  they're  always  laughin'  and  cuttin' 
up.  Then  they're  usually  tryin'  to  get  on  your 
good  side  an'  work  you  for  somethin.'  Would  ya 
like  to  meet  this  dame?  I  don't  know  just  how 
far  she'll  go  but  she  might  come  across  if  you 
work  her  right." 

"Sure,  lead  me  to  her,"  said  Carl,  inaudibly 
laughing  to  himself. 

"Alright,  I'll  make  it  for  eight  tuhmorrow  night. 
The  four  of  us'll  go  somewhere  .  .  Well,  one  more 
an'  we'll  beat  it.  Jack." 

Glancing  swiftly  ahead,  Carl  saw  that  this 
engagement  would  demand  a  certain  sum  of 
money  and  he  wondered  how  he  could  obtain  it 
since  he  would  not  be  paid  for  his  present  work 
until  the  end  of  the  week.  While  he  stood,  grasp- 
ing this  little  perplexity,  he  noticed  that  a  man 
at  his  left  had  placed  a  ten-dollar  bill  on  the  bar, 
in  payment  for  a  drink,  and  that  the  man  was 
immersed  in  a  violent  argument  with  a  friend, 
with  his  back  turned  to  the  bar.  The  bartender 
was  at  the  other  end  of  the  counter,  and  after  a 
glance  at  Petersen,  who  stood  dully  peering  into 
his  empty  glass,  Carl  whisked  the  bill  into  one  of 

67 


BLACKGUARD 

his  coat  pockets.  Then  he  quickly  prodded  Peter- 
sen's shoulder. 

"Come  on,  let's  go,"  he  said,  and  the  two  walked 
out  of  the  saloon,  Carl  taking  care  to  stroll  in  a 
reluctant  fashion  and  steeling  himself  for  the 
angry  shout  that  might  come. 

As  Carl  walked  down  the  street  he  felt  a  twinge 
of  regret  at  having  stolen  the  money  of  a  stum- 
bling, minor  puppet.  He  told  himself  that  this 
petty  gesture  had  been  forced  upon  him  by  an 
innately  vicious  contortion  known  as  life,  but  his 
emotions  cringed  as  they  arranged  an  appropriate 
explanation. 

"This  man  whom  I  have  robbed  will  curse  the 
treacherous  unfairness  of  life  and  his  eyes,  dilated 
with  bitterness,  will  see  more  clearly  his  relation 
to  the  things  around  him.  In  this  way  I  have 
really  befriended  him.  The  railroad-detective, 
who  once  struck  me  on  the  head  with  the  butt  of 
a  pistol,  when  I  was  offering  no  resistance,  was 
trying  to  obtain  revenge — revenge  upon  the  people 
who  had  made  him  their  snarling  slave — and  he 
blindly  reached  out  for  the  object  nearest  to  him, 
which  happened  to  be  my  head.  But  there  was  no 
desire  for  vengeance  in  my  own  gesture.  I  steal 
from  men  in  order  to  prevent  life  from  stealing 

68 


BLACKGUARD 

an  occasional  refuge  for  my  thoughts  and  emo- 
tions.    A  purely  practical  device." 

He  left  Petersen  at  the  next  street-corner  and 
boarded  a  crowded  street-car,  reflecting  on  his 
engagement  to  meet  the  "quiet  an'  thin  Lucy"  as 
he  stood  wearily  clinging  to  the  leather  strap. 
Petersen's  attitude  toward  women  was  a  familiar 
joke.    Dressed  in  its  little  array  of  fixed  and  con- 
fident variations  it  had  pursued  Carl  in  the  past 
without  repulsing  or  flattering  him.     To  him  it 
was  an  elaborately  pitiful  delusion  of  dominance 
made  by  hosts  of  men,  who  felt  the  craving  to 
inject  a  dramatic  variety  and  assurance  into  the 
frightened  monotones  of  their  lives.    In  an  aching 
effort  to  dignify  their  barren   days  these  men 
adopted  the  roles  of  hunters  and  masters  among 
women.     They  entered,  with  infinite  coarseness 
and  precision,  a  glamorous  realm  of  lies,  jealous- 
ies, cruelties,  and  haloes,  and  in  this  wildly  fan- 
tastic land  they  managed  to  forget  the  flatly  sub- 
missive attitudes  of  another  world.    Carl  was  tell- 
ing himself  that  he  had  been  waiting  for  a  woman 
who  could  bring  him  something  more  than  the 
crudely  veiled  undulation  of  flesh  but  he  fashioned 
the  starving  little  romance  with  great  deliberate- 
ness. 

69 


BLACKGUARD 

"Women  have  excited  my  flesh  and  it  has  often 
yielded  to  them,  but  that  is  simply  a  necessary 
triviality,"  he  said  to  himself.  "I,  too,  must  seek 
to  evade  the  monotonies  and  restrictions  of  my 
life,  lest  I  become  mad,  but  at  least  I  am  quite 
conscious  of  the  joke.  The  cheap  little  drug-store 
does  not  witness  any  hoodwinked  swaggers  on  my 
part!  So  on  to  quiet  Lucy,  with  her  stiff  stupidi- 
ties and  elastic  curves." 

Once  more  he  had  to  pass  the  garrulous  sentries 
at  the  gate — the  neighbors  around  the  doorstep. 
They  eyed  the  dirt  upon  his  clothes  and  face  with 
an  amazed  contempt — Carrie  Felman's  son  a  com- 
mon laborer ! — and  lost  in  their  scrutiny  they  gave 
him  monosyllabic  greetings. 

"Well,  judging  from  the  dirt  all  over  you  you've 
found  a  job,"  said  his  mother  in  tones  of  blunt 
resignation. 

"Yes,  I'm  working  as  a  lineman's  helper  for  the 
telephone  company,"  he  answered  in  an  expres- 
sionless voice. 

After  he  had  washed  his  parents  pelted  him 
with  amiable  questions — the  details  of  his  work, 
wages,  and  companions — a  dash  of  solicitude 
swinging  with  their  desire  to  entertain  the  dull 
aftermath  of  a  hot  summer  day.     He  answered 

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BLACKGUARD 

their  questions  patiently  and  they  were  glad  that 
their  son  seemed  ready  to  plunge  his  "wildness" 
into  the  soothing  currents  of  an  average  life. 
Their  affection  for  him  was  only  able  to  dominate 
their  hearts  when  he  failed  to  challenge  the  peace- 
ful assumptions  and  bargains  of  their  lives,  for 
otherwise  it  verged  into  hatred  because  it  was  con- 
fronted by  a  stabbing  mystery  which  it  could  not 
understand. 

After  the  evening  meal  he  sat  in  an  easy  chair 
upholstered  with  violent  green  plush  and  usually 
occupied  at  such  times  by  his  father,  but  donated 
to  him  in  honor  of  his  first  evening  of  submission. 
He  sprawled  in  the  chair,  trifling  with  the  head- 
lines of  a  newspaper  and  throwing  them  aside.  A 
warm  and  not  unpleasant  stupor  began  to  descend 
upon  his  thoughts  and  emotions  and  they  fluttered 
spasmodically,  like  circles  of  drugged  butterflies. 
He  closed  his  eyes.  His  legs  and  arms  held  a  heav- 
iness which  he  enjoyed  because  he  was  not  forced 
to  raise  it. 

"Will  this  be  my  end — a  swinging  of  arms  and 
legs  during  the  daytime  and  then  different  shades 
of  sleep  or  sensual  bravado  at  night?"  he  asked 
himself  drowsily — a  well-remembered  sentence 
that  needed  little  consciousness. 

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BLACKGUARD 

Suddenlj'-,  an  emotional  revolt  within  him  tore 
against  his  physical  lethargy,  like  lightnings  from 
some  unguessed  depth  of  his  soul,  and  he  was 
astonished  to  find  himself  sitting  upright  in  the 
chair.     He  saluted  the  victory  joyously. 

"By  God,  I  won't  give  in  as  easily  as  this,"  he 
whispered  to  the  purple  grapes  on  the  tan  wall- 
paper, addressing  them  because  their  ugliness  was 
at  least  helplessly  inert.  "You're  concrete  sym- 
bols, if  nothing  else,  and  you  don't  stumble  amidst 
unconquered  clouds.  I'll  go  to  the  park  and  try  to 
write  a  poem." 

Agreeably  amazed  at  the  returning  vestige  of 
strength  in  his  legs  he  walked  to  the  public-park 
and  sat  down  upon  a  bench.  Ignoring  the  people 
who  were  strolling  or  romping  around  him  he  bent 
over  his  paper-pad  and  tugged  at  the  smooth  inso- 
lence of  rhyme  and  meter,  but  the  fight  was  an 
uneven  one  since  his  mind  and  emotions  were  still 
brittle  and  dazed  from  their  day  of  hurried  sub- 
jection. After  crumbling  sheets  of  paper  for  two 
hours  he  wrote : 

TO  A  SAND-PIPER 
One  blast — a  mildly  frightened  little  host 
Of  liquid  sprites,  each  holding  one  high 
note, 

72 


BLACKGUARD 

Aroused  from  some  repentance  in  the 

throat 
Of  this  grey-yellow  bird  who  skims  the 

coast — 
And  silence.   Far  off  I  can  somehow  feel 
The    drooping-winged    sprites    back    to 

covert  steal. 
The  poem  did  not  satisfy  him,  and  in  a  measure 

he  felt  like  a  sleepwalker  who  was  imitating  ges- 
tures that  had  lost  their  meaning  to  him,  but  he 
dared  not  substitute  his  actual  thoughts  and  emo- 
tions in  place  of  the  tenuous  or  stilted  fancies 
which  he  believed  were  all  that  poetry  was  allowed 
to  achieve.  All  that  he  wanted  to  say,  and  all 
that  he  did  say  in  conversation  with  himself,  mut- 
tered unhappily  within  him  as  he  sat  on  the 
bench  and  strained  to  capture  the  pretty  sugges- 
tions of  a  mystical  rapture,  but  he  was  slave  to 
the  belief  that  poetry  was  a  thinly  aristocratic 
experience  in  which  thoughts  and  emotions, 
serene,  noble,  and  ludicrously  artificial,  disdained 
the  lunges  of  thought  and  the  turmoils  of  an  ac- 
tual world — pale,  washed-out  princes  contending 
among  themselves  for  trinket-devices  known  as 
rhymes  and  meters. 

He  rose  from  the  bench,  impoverished  by  the 
effort  that  he  had  made  to  counteract  a  day  of 
toil,  and  trudged  homeward. 

73 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    VI. 

After  stumbling  through  another  day  of  heav- 
ing muscles  and  bruised  shins,  with  his  self -hatred 
gloating  over  the  slavery  of  his  body,  he  met 
Petersen  and  the  two  girls  at  a  down-town  street- 
corner,  grinning  at  the  thought  of  what  this 
experience  might  hold,  for  he  liked  the  idea  of 
pretending  to  be  a  sensual  beggar  while  a  sneer 
within  him  played  the  part  of  a  bystander. 

Petersen's  sweetheart,  Katie  Anderson,  was  a 
short,  plump  girl  who  tried,  with  the  incessant 
swiftness  of  her  tongue,  to  apologize  for  the 
excessive  slowness  of  her  thoughts.  The  coarse 
roundness  of  her  face  was  determinedly  obscured 
by  rouge  and  powder,  and  her  large  brown  eyes 
were  continually  shifting,  as  though  they  feared 
that  stillness  might  betray  some  secret  which  they 
held.  Her  face  knew  a  species  of  sly  and  mild 
cunning  not  unlike  that  of  a  rabbit  frequently 
beaten  by  life  but  clinging  to  its  mask  of  courage 
while  hopping  through  the  forest  of  sensual 
experience.  Her  friend,  Lucy  Melkin,  was  more 
subdued  and  helplessly  candid.    Her  small  slender 

74 


BLACKGUARD 

body  stooped  a  little  as  though  some  unseen  hand 
were  pressing  too  familiarly  upon  one  of  her 
shoulders — a  hand  of  exhausted  fear — and  the 
pale  oval  of  her  face  had  the  twist  of  a  loosely 
pleading  infant  beneath  its  idiotic  red  and  white. 
Her  blue  eyes  seemed  to  be  endlessly  waiting  for 
something  to  strike  them  and  wondering  why  the 
blow  failed  to  arrive  on  time. 

Petersen  suggested  that  they  should  visit  an 
adjacent  vaudeville  theater  and  when  Carl  and  the 
others  agreed  they  walked  through  the  crowded 
streets. 

"Baby,  but  I've  had  some  day,"  said  Katie. 
"Them  shoppers  sure  get  on  your  nerves,  I'm  tell- 
ing you.  But  you're  not  gonna  let  me  work  all 
the  time,  are  you,  Charlie  dear?" 

"There's  no  harm  in  workin',"  said  Petersen, 
not  wanting  to  be  quite  placed  in  the  position  of 
disdaining  an  essential  fact  within  his  life.  "No 
harm.  I  gotta  take  a  lot  of  sass  myself  from  the 
foreman  but  it's  all  in  the  day's  game.  You  don't 
get  nothin'  easy  in  this  world,  'less  you're  a  crook, 
and  if  y'are  you'll  soon  wind  up  in  a  place  where 
ya  don't  wanta  be.  But  still,  a  good-iookin'  girl 
like  you,  Katie,  shouldn't  hafta  stand  on  her  feet 

75 


BLACKGUARD 

all  day.  Don't  be  afraid,  I'll  make  it  easier  for  ya 
pretty  soon." 

"Now  Charle-e,  the  way  you  flatter  is  some- 
thin'  terrible,"  said  Katie,  with  a  simper  of  nude 
delight.  "I  suppose  Mister  Felman  would  like  to 
get  some  nice  girl  too,  wouldn't  you,  Mister  Fel- 
man? Or  maybe  you've  got  two  or  three  already. 
You  men  can  never  be  trusted." 

"No,  I  haven't  been  lucky,"  said  Carl,  secretly 
exploding  with  a  laughter  that  was  partly  directed 
at  himself. 

He  had  been  afraid  that  these  girls  would  prove 
to  be  of  the  shallowly  sophisticated,  carefully 
sulky  type  and  he  felt  relieved  at  their  coarsely 
direct  naivetes.  An  axe,  with  baby-blue  ribbon 
tied  around  it,  was  more  entertaining  than  a 
pocket-knife  steeped  in  cheap  perfume. 

"No,  I  haven't  been  lucky,"  he  went  on,  "but, 
you  know,  we're  always  waiting  for  the  right  one." 

"Why,  that's  just  what  Lucy  always  says,"  said 
Katie,  rolling  her  eyes  as  she  looked  at  the  other 
girl  in  a  ponderously  insinuating  manner.  "She's 
always  been  rowmantic,  like  you.  Mister  Felman. 
Why  if  I  was  to  tell  you  of  all  the  fellas  she's 
turned  down  you  wouldn't  believe  me." 

"No,  perhaps  I  wouldn't,"  answered  Carl,  keep- 

76 


BLACKGUARD 

ing  his  face  sober  with  a  massive  effort. 

"Now,  Katie,  you  keep  quiet,"  said  Lucy,  and 
Carl  was  surprised  at  the  actual  anger  that  hard- 
ened her  voice.  "I'm  perfectly  able  to  talk  about 
my  own  business  without  your  helpin'  an'  it's  not 
nice  to  be  sayin'  such  things  to  a  gen'lman  who's 
just  met  me.  I'm  sure  he's  not  interested  in  my 
past  an'  even  if  he  is  I'm  the  one  to  tell  him  an* 
not  you.    You  make  me  tired!" 

"Well,  of  all  things,"  cried  Katie.  "I  was  only 
try  in'  to  be  nice  an'  here  you  go  and  get  real 
angry  about  it.  I've  never  had  a  girl  frien'  who 
was  as  touchy  as  you  are.  I  didn't  really  tell 
Mister  Felman  anything  about  you  'cept  that 
you  was  rowmantic,  an'  that's  nothin'  to  be 
ashamed  about." 

"See  here,  stop  all  this  quarrelin',"  said  Peter- 
sen, to  whom  the  speech  of  women  was  always  an 
ignorance  that  assailed  the  patience  of  masculine 
wisdom.  "You  women  can  talk  for  ten  hours 
about  nothin'!  I  didn't  bring  my  friend  down  to 
have  him  lissen  to  your  squabblin'.  Cut  it  out,  I 
tell  ya." 

This  storm  in  an  earthen  jar  was  amusing  to 
Carl.  He  marvelled  at  the  ability  of  these  people 
to  whip  words  into  redundantly  nondescript  droves 

77 


BLACKGUARD 

in  which  thought  gasped  weakly  as  it  strove  to 
follow  the  uproar  of  simple  emotions.  Continually, 
he  felt  the  reactions  of  a  visitor  from  another 
planet,  witnessing  an  incredible  vaudeville-show. 
All  human  beings  to  him  were  hollow  and  secretly 
despairing  falsehoods  separated  only  by  the  clev- 
erness or  crudeness  of  their  verbal  disguises,  and 
he  heard  them  with  an  emotion  that  was  evenly 
divided  between  amazement  and  a  chuckle. 

"I'm  sure  that  Miss  Anderson  meant  no  harm," 
said  Carl,  with  a  whim  to  become  the  glib  peace- 
maker. "She  was  just  feeling  gay  and  frisky, 
and  I  took  her  words  in  the  right  spirit.  Miss 
Melkin  was  a  little  angry  because  she  thought  that 
I  didn't  understand  Miss  Anderson's  intentions, 
but  she  needn't  be  afraid.  I  never  misinterpret. 
It  was  just  a  little  misunderstanding  on  both  sides 
so  let's  forget  about  it." 

"Mister  Felman,  you're  such  a  perfect  gen'l- 
man,"  said  Katie,  blithely. 

Carl  looked  at  Lucy  and  saw  that  a  wistfully 
surprised  expression  was  liking  his  words  and  try- 
ing to  explain  them  to  her  mind.  It  was  the  look 
of  a  baby  flirting  with  an  incongruous  sophistica- 
tion and  striving  to  create  a  fusion  between  ingen- 
uousness and  a  certain  sensual  wisdom  learned  in 
the  alleys  of  life. 

78 


BLACKGUARD 

"Ah,  these  starved  dwarfs,  how  little  it  takes  to 
please  them,"  Carl  sighed  to  himself. 

After  the  wiry,  tawdry  spectacle  of  the  vaude- 
ville show,  with  its  weary  acrobats  and  falsetto 
singers,  the  four  visited  a  grimly  gaudy  Chinese 
restaurant,  where  the  Orient  becomes  an  awk- 
ward prostitute  for  Occidental  dollars,  and  while 
Petersen  and  Katie  gossiped  about  their  friends 
Carl  and  Lucy  traded  hesitant  sentences  and 
threw  little  sensual  appeals  from  the  steady  gaze 
of  their  eyes.  Lucy,  with  her  look  of  a  stunned 
infant,  made  him  feel  vaguely  troubled — the 
ghost  of  a  fatherly  impulse.  After  the  meal  the 
group  separated,  since  the  girls  lived  in  different 
parts  of  the  city,  and  as  Carl  and  Lucy  rode  in  the 
trolley  car  they  tried  to  make  their  anticipations 
more  at  ease,  with  the  veils  of  conversation. 

"Why  do  you  live?"  asked  Carl,  abruptly,  to 
see  whether  one  or  two  words  in  her  answer  might 
be  different  from  what  he  expected. 

"What  a  funny  question !"  cried  Lucy.  "I  don't 
know.  Maybe  it's  because  I  wanta  be  happy.  I 
never  am  mosta  the  time,  but  then  I'm  always 
hopin'  that  things'll  change.  Why'd  you  ask  me 
that  funny  question?" 

The  fumbling  bewilderment  of  her  words  irri- 

79 


BLACKGUARD 

tated  and  saddened  Carl,  simultaneously,  and  in 
an  effort  to  slay  the  reaction  he  simulated  a  com- 
passion. 

"Happiness  doesn't  always  speak  the  truth,"  he 
said,  struggling  to  mould  his  words  so  that  they 
could  reach  her  understanding.  "It's  sometimes  a 
beautiful  lie.  You  understand  ?  A  beautiful,  soft, 
desperate  lie.  And  we  say  the  lie  because  we 
want  to  change  ourselves  and  somebody  else  to 
something  that  can  make  us  forget  our  smallness. 
You  see,  we  are  not  very  large,  either  in  our  bodies 
or  in  our  thoughts,  and  we  try  to  make  ourselves 
several  feet  taller,  tall  enough  to  put  our  heads 
on  a  level  with  the  trees,  tall  enough  to  imagine 
that  the  wind  respects  us.  Beautiful,  desperate 
lies.    Do  you  understand?" 

"I  don't  quite  understand  you,"  said  Lucy.  "You 
speak  so  different  from  all  the  men  I  know,  so 
different,  and  yet  I  like  the  way  you  speak.  Do 
you  mean  it's  not  good  for  anyone  to  be  happy?" 

"If  your  happiness  doesn't  put  you  to  sleep  it's 
good  for  you.  When  people  try  to  be  happy  for 
more  than  a  little  while  it  makes  them  sleepy. 
And,  you  see,  it's  much  better  to  be  very  much 
alive,  or  very  dead." 

"Honest,  I'd  like  to  get  what  you're  sayin'," 

80 


BLACKGUARD 

said  Lucy,  perplexed  and  softly  candid.  "Maybe 
you  mean  that  we  oughta  keep  movin'  all  the  time, 
hearin'  and  seein'  different  things,  an'  maybe 
you're  right  about  that.  I  get  tired  of  goin'  down 
to  work  every  mornin'  and  coming  back  to  the 
same  room  every  night.  I'd  like  to  travel  around, 
an'  see  different  people  an'  places,  an'  find  out 
what  everything's  like.  But  I  guess  I  never  will." 
"It's  much  easier  than  you  imagine,"  said  Carl. 
"Just  pack  up  your  grip  some  morning  and  ride 
away  to  another  city  and  see  what  happens  there. 
After  you've  done  it  you'll  wonder  what  held  you 
back." 

"Oh  I  just  couldn't  do  that.  I'd  make  my 
mother  so  unhappy  if  I  did,  an'  besides,  I'd  be 
afraid  of  goin'  somewhere  all  alone.  I  might  not 
find  any  work  in  the  place  where  I  went,  an'  then 
I'd  be  up  against  it.  I'd  like  to  travel  around  with 
plenty  of  money,  an'  nothin'  to  worry  me,  an' " 

Her  words  trailed  off  into  a  revealing  silence, 
and  Carl  smiled  sadly  at  the  little,  pitifully  obvious 
hint  within  her  faltering.  Perhaps  it  might  be 
best  to  marry  this  simple,  mildly  wistful,  ignorant 
girl  and  surrender  himself  to  monotonous  toil  and 
sensual  warmth,  forgetting  the  schemes  that  were 
torturing  his  heart  and  mind.    The  reaction  cap- 

8i 


BLACKGUARD 

tured  him  for  a  time  and  then  died.  No,  he  was 
gripped  by  a  snarling,  nimble  blackguard  who  was 
determined  to  lead  him  to  destruction  or  victory. 
And  in  the  meantime,  here  was  sensual  forgetf ul- 
ness — an  interlude  with  a  girl  to  whom  happiness 
was  merely  physical  desire  captivated  by  filmy 
and  soothing  disguises. 

They  reached  her  home,  a  grey  cottage  in  the 
suburbs,  with  a  little  yard  of  dusty  grass  and  a 
modest  porch.  It  bore  an  aspect  of  abject  sim- 
plicity, and  that  meditative  leer  possessed  by  the 
fronts  of  all  cottages.  They  sat  in  a  hammock 
on  the  porch,  and  Carl  suddenly  kissed  her  with 
the  theatrical  intensity  of  one  who  is  trying  to 
shake  off  a  deliberate  role.  The  gasping  expostu- 
lations of  her  voice  were  contradicted  by  the  limp- 
ness of  her  body,  and  sighing  at  this  prearranged 
incongruity,  Carl  kissed  her  again,  still  feeling 
like  a  skillful  charlatan  and  still  hoping  to  lure 
himself  into  a  tumultuous  spontaneity.  This  time 
she  was  silent  but  gripped  his  shoulders  with  both 
hands,  while  little  shades  of  fright  and  desire 
gambled  for  her  face.  Suddenly,  a  meek  candor 
came  to  her  eyes  and  the  seriousness  of  a  child 
lost  in  an  overwhelming  forest  moulded  her  lips. 

"Will  you  be  good  to  me  if  I  let  you  ?"  she  whis- 
pered. 

82 


BLACKGUARD 

The  pathetic,  cringing  frankness  of  her  words 
made  a  stabbing  lunge  at  his  deliberateness  and 
a  feeling  of  troubled  tenderness  mastered  his 
heart.  He  wept  inaudibly,  as  though  he  himself 
had  become  a  begging  child,  and  the  illusion  of 
rare  experience,  cheated  and  twisted  out  of  his 
life,  returned  to  betray  him.  His  head  struck  her 
shoulder  like  the  death  of  regret. 


83 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    VII. 

From  that  night  on  his  life  fell  into  a  regular 
stride — days  of  wrenching  labor  and  nights  of 
rebellious  weariness,  broken  by  intervals  in  which 
he  crept,  like  a  swindled,  dirty  child,  to  the  arms 
of  Lucy,  washed  into  a  dreamless  rest  by  the 
simple  flow  of  her  desire  for  him  and  her  sight- 
less worship.  To  her  he  was  an  enigmatic,  statu- 
esque prince  delighting  her  with  queer  words 
which  she  could  finger  as  though  they  were  new 
toys  and  bringing  her  an  eager  compression  of 
grief  and  joy  which  she  had  never  known  before. 
She  realized,  dimly,  that  he  was  fundamentally 
alien  to  her,  and  she  often  said  to  herself:  "Some 
day  he'll  meet  a  child  who  c'n  understand  all  of 
his  funny  words  and  then  he'll  forget  about  me," 
but  this  fear  only  increased  the  stubbornness  of 
her  grasp.  And  so  his  life  wavered  between  toil, 
and  sensual  peace,  and  little  mildly  stunted  poems 
until  one  morning  in  late  autumn  when,  at  the 
main  office  of  the  telephone  company,  he  was 
discharged  with  the  information  that  his  job  had 
been  merely  a  temporary  one. 

84 


BLACKGUARD 

"Thanks,  old  boy,"  he  said  loudly  in  the  face  of 
the  astonished  cashier.  "If  you  knew  what  a 
relief  this  is  to  me  you'd  take  a  drink  with  me  to 
celebrate  the  occasion." 

"Now  what  in  the  devil's  the  matter  with  you?" 
— the  man  voiced  his  peevish  perplexity  as  he 
fished  for  Carl's  pay  envelope. 

"I  was  getting  accustomed  to  the  chains,  but 
now  that  you've  benignly  removed  them  I'll  make 
another  effort  to  escape,"  he  answered,  in  the  grip 
of  a  gay  and  aimless  relief. 

The  clerk  tapped  his  forehead,  with  a  scowl, 
and  contemptuously  tossed  over  the  envelope. 
Carl  carelessly  stuffed  the  sixteen  dollars  into  a 
pocket  and  walked  out  upon  the  crowded  down- 
town streets.  The  streets  were  touched  with  the 
middle  of  forenoon,  that  hour  when  the  business 
section  of  an  American  city  is  most  leisurely  and 
nondescript  in  its  make-up.  The  wagons  and 
trucks  were  not  yet  bombarding  time  with  the 
full  climax  of  their  inane  roar  and  the  flatly 
hideous  elevated  railroad  trains  were  firing  at 
longer  intervals.  Noise  had  not  yet  become  the 
confused  and  staggering  slave  of  an  ill-tempered 
avarice.  The  nomads  and  idlers  of  the  city's  popu- 
lace were  flitting  in  and  out  among  housewives  on 

85 


BLACKGUARD 

an  early  shopping-tour  and  those  sleekly  bloated 
men  who  stroll  belatedly  to  their  "offices.  A  sleepy 
young  vaudeville  actress,  painted  and  satiated, 
hurried  to  some  booking-agency;  a  middle-aged 
pickpocket  emphasized  his  grey  and  white  checked 
suit  with  sturdy  limbs  and  examined  passersby, 
with  the  face  of  a  shaved  fox ;  an  undertaker,  tall 
and  old,  paced  along  with  that  air  of  worried 
dignity  which  his  calling  affects;  a  fairly  young 
housewife  pounded  the  sedate  roundness  of  her 
body  over  the  pavement  and  held  the  hand  of  a 
small,  oppressed  boy ;  a  stock-raiser  from  the  west 
slid  his  bulky  ruddiness  along  the  street,  while 
beneath  his  broad-brimmed  hat  his  face  held  an 
expression  of  awe-stricken  delight;  a  college-girl, 
slender  and  carefully  hidden  by  silk,  strove  with 
every  mincing  twist  of  her  body  to  remind  you 
that  she  was  pretty;  a  youth,  trimly  effeminate 
and  attended  by  an  inexpensive  perfume,  trotted 
along,  eyeing  the  scene  with  an  affected  air  of  dis- 
approval. 

The  streets  were  cluttered  with  a  ludicrous, 
artificial  union  of  people  —  people  who  were 
close  together  and  yet  essentially  unaware  of  each 
other's  presence,  and  the  invisible,  purposeless 
walls  of  civilization    crossed    each    other   every- 

86 


BLACKGUARD 

where.  If  he  swerved  two  inches  to  the  right  the 
chained  trance  of  this  lonely  farm-hand  might 
strike  the  shoulder  of  this  dully  wounded  cham- 
bermaid from  the  Rialto  Hotel,  and  with  this  hap- 
pening their  lives  might  become  an  inch  less  bur- 
dened and  struggling.  Their  sidelong  glances 
cross  for  a  moment,  like  tensely  held  spears,  but 
they  pass  each  other  from  cautious  habit,  strid- 
ing to  more  prearranged  and  empty  contacts. 
Civilization  has  raised  wall-making  to  a  fine  art, 
striving  to  hide  its  dreamlessness  beneath  an  as- 
pect of  complex  reticence,  and  keeping  its  human 
atoms  feeble  and  solitary,  since  pressed  together 
they  might  break  it  into  ruins.  During  the  rush- 
hours  of  a  city  you  can  see  those  streams  of  people 
who  are  busily  making  and  repairing  the  walls, 
but  during  the  lulls  in  the  fever  upon  city  streets 
you  may  observe  the  stragglers,  wanderers,  and 
grown-up  children  who  are  not  quite  connected 
with  this  task  and  who  humbly  or  viciously  hurdle 
the  barriers  that  separate  them. 

These  thoughts  and  emotions  formed  them- 
selves in  Carl's  mood  as  he  strolled  through  the 
clattering,  mercenary  sounds  of  a  midwestern 
city.  The  joy  of  not  being  compelled  to  cope  with 
undesired  physical  movements  brought  its  light- 

87 


BLACKGUARD 

ness  to  his  legs,  and  he  hurriedly  fished  for  secrets 
from  the  thousands  of  faces  gliding  past  him. 
This  shrouded  girl  with  a  scowling  face — was  she 
meditating  upon  the  possibility  of  suicide,  or  won- 
dering why  her  sweetheart  had  failed  to  purchase 
a  more  expensive  box  of  candy  ?  Each  face  curved 
its  flesh  over  a  triviality  or  an  important  affair 
and  swiftly  taunted  his  imagination,  challenging 
it  to  remove  the  masks  that  confronted  it. 

"Life  holds  a  measure  of  anticipation  and  mys- 
tery because  people  for  the  most  part  pass  each 
other  in  silence.  If  they  stopped  to  talk  to  each 
other  they  would  become  transparent  and  weari- 
some." 

As  Carl  walked  along  hope  began  to  sing  its 
juvenile  ballade  within  his  contorted  heart.  He 
planned  to  send  his  poems  to  the  magazines  and  he 
felt  strengthened  by  the  unexpected  lull  of  this 
late  autumn  morning.  He  hurried  to  his  favorite 
bench  in  the  public  square,  one  that  he  alv/ays 
occupied  if  it  happened  to  be  vacant  when  he 
passed.  He  had  a  shyly  whimsical  fancy — a  last 
remnant  of  youth  asserting  itself  within  him — 
that  his  touch  upon  this  bench  stayed  there  while 
he  was  absent  and  gave  a  sense  of  invisible,  prod- 
ding communion  to  other  pilgrim-acrobats  who 

88 


BLACKGUARD 

occupied  this  seat  at  times — an  abashed  bit  of  sen- 
timentality evading  itself  with  an  image.  Filled 
with  the  alert  meeting  of  hope  and  bitterness  he 
wrote  with  a  degree  of  fluid  ease  that  had  never 
visited  him  before,  and  for  the  first  time  his 
lyrics  grazed  a  phrase  or  two  that  rumored  recal- 
citrantly  of  a  proud  story  known  as  beauty.  In 
one  attempted  poem  he  asserted  that  an  old, 
blind,  Greek  huckster  on  the  side  street  of  an 
American  city  had  suddenly  towered  above  the 
barrenly  angular  buildings,  in  a  massive  reincar- 
nation of  Homer,  and  he  wrote  in  part : 

A  purplish  pallor  stole 

Over  your  antique  face — 

The  warning  of  a  soul 

Rising  with  tireless  grace. 

Rising  above  your  cart 

Of  apples,  figs,  and  plums, 

And  with  its  swelling  art 

Deriding  the  city's  drums. 

With  a  quivering  immersion  he  bent  over  his 
paper,  lost  to  the  keen  realities  of  a  city  day. 
Sidling  vagrants  and  transients  from  small  towns 
glanced  at  him  with  morose  disfavor  and  some- 
times stopped  to  stare  at  this  shabby  young  man 
whose  head  was  never  raised  from  his  writing. 

89 


BLACKGUARD 

His  abstraction  was  an  insult  to  their  sense  of  idle 
release.  He  wrote  for  hours  and  only  paused 
when  hunger  of  a  different  kind  began  irresistibly 
to  whisper  within  him,  for  he  had  not  eaten  since 
morning.  It  was  six  o'clock  when  he  hastened 
from  the  park.  He  joined  the  homeward  bound 
masses,  feeling  satiated  and  apart,  and  dreading 
the  evening  contact  with  his  sagging,  verbose 
parents.  They  were  sitting  and  standing  in  two 
of  the  few  postures  that  life  still  absentmindedly 
allowed  them — bending  over  newspaper  and  fry- 
ing-pan. 

"Well,  I've  lost  my  job,"  he  said  to  his  father. 

His  father  dropped  the  newspaper  and  his 
mother  shuffled  in  from  the  kitchen. 

"Lost  your  job — what  do  you  mean?"  said  his 
mother  with  slow  incredulity,  as  though  she  had 
just  escaped  being  crushed  by  a  falling  wall. 

"They  told  me  this  morning  that  it  had  only 
been  a  temporary  one  and  they  paid  me  off.  I 
thanked  the  clerk  for  his  news  but  he  didn't  seem 
to  take  it  in  the  right  spirit." 

"Ach,  I  knew  it  would  happen,  I  knew  it,"  said 
Mrs.  Felman.  "Here's  what  you  get  from  your 
ma-anooal  labor!  What  kind  of  work  is  that  for 
an  educated  boy  like  you  ?    With  your  brains,  now, 

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BLACKGUARD 

you  could  go  out  on  the  road  and  sell  goods.  You 
should  have  more  get-up  about  you.  Mrs.  Feins- 
thai  was  telling  me  at  my  whist-club  today  that 
her  son  Harry  is  making  piles  of  money  with 
Liebman  and  Company.  Sells  notions  and  knick- 
knacks.  You  could  easy  do  the  same  if  you  had 
any  sense  in  your  head." 

"Carrie's  right,  this  slavery  is  no  work  for  a 
smart  man,"  said  Mr.  Felman.  "Any  fool,  you 
know,  can  work  with  his  hands,  but  it  takes  real 
intelligence  to  make  a  man  buy  something.  I 
want  you  to  be  able  to  laugh  at  people,  and  feel 
independent,  and  not  be  a  poor  schlemiel  all  your 
life." 

"Well,  you've  been  a  travelling  salesman  for 
twenty  years,"  said  Carl,  with  a  weary  smile,  "and 
before  that  you  tried  a  general  merchandise  store, 
but  it  doesn't  seem  to  have  brought  you  much 
money  or  happiness.  You  recommend  a  treacher- 
ous wine.  The  thing  that  you've  fought  for  has 
always  scarred  and  eluded  you.  What's  the  rea- 
son?" 

Mr.  Felman  lowered  his  head  while  the  round 
fatness  of  his  face  revealed  a  huddled  confusion 
of  emotions  in  which  shame  and  annoyance  pre- 
dominated.    He  sat,  tormenting  his  greyish  red 

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BLACKGUARD 

moustache,  as  though  it  were  a  fraudulent  badge, 
and  gazing  with  still  eyes  at  a  newspaper  which  he 
was  not  reading. 

"Perhaps  I've  inherited  nothing  from  you  save 
your  curious  inability  at  making  money,"  said 
Carl,  trying  to  feel  a  ghost  of  compassion  for  this 
petrified,  minor  soldier  lost  in  the  uproar  of  a 
battle  but  still  worshipping  his  glittering  general. 
"You've  spent  all  of  your  life  in  chasing  a  frigid 
will-o'-the-wisp,  made  out  of  the  lining  of  your 
heart,  and  you  want  me  to  stumble  after  the  same 
mutilated  futility.  You're  not  unintelligent,  as 
far  as  business  ability  goes,  and  yet,  you've  always 
been  doomed  to  a  kind  of  respectable  poverty. 
Something  else  within  you  must  have  constantly 
fought  with  another  delusion  to  produce  such  a 
result.  You  can't  simply  blame  it  on  luck — that's 
an  overworked  excuse.  Perhaps  you  failed  to  win 
your  god  because  you've  never  been  able  to  teach 
efficiency  and  strength  to  the  spirit  of  cruelty 
within  you.  You  have  not  been  remorselessly 
shrewd,  my  father,  and  now  you  are  paying  the 
penalty." 

"Well,  because  I've  been  a  fool  that's  no  sign 
that  you  should  be  one,  too,"  answered  Mr.  Fel- 
man  in  a  voice  of  reluctant  and  secretly  tortured 

92      . 


BLACKGUARD 

self-reproach.  "Yes,  I've  been  too  kind-hearted 
for  my  own  good,  dammit,  but  I  want  that  you 
should  be  different.  It's  been  too  easy  for  people 
to  swindle  me.  Yes,  I  want  you  to  show  them 
something  that  your  poor  old  father  couldn't. 
Yes.  And  as  for  your  talk  about  chasing  money, 
tell  me,  how  can  a  man  live  decent  without  plenty 
of  money  ?    How  can  he  ?" 

"We  would  have  our  nice  store  this  very  minute 
if  your  father  had  listened  to  me,"  said  Mrs.  Fel- 
man,  mournfully.  "He  never  would  let  me  handle 
the  reins.  I  know  how  to  be  firm  with  people, 
believe  me,  but  your  father  would  always  give 
credit  to  every  Tom-Dick-and-Harry  that  walked 
into  the  store.  And  whenever  he  did  have  money 
he  always  gambled  it  away.  Gambling  has  been 
the  ruination  of  his  life!  All  of  your  wildness, 
Carl,  has  come  from  your  father's  side  and  not 
from  mine!" 

Mr.  i^'elman  looked  at  his  son  with  an  embar- 
rassed admission  of  secret  sins,  while  for  a  mo- 
ment he  became  a  faun  lamenting  his  awkward- 
ness, and  his  uneasy  smile  quivered  as  it  tried  to 
say :  "Alas,  I  am  not  so  much  better  than  you  are, 
my  crazy,  foolish  son."  Carl  grinned  in  return 
and  for  the  first  time  in  his  life  was  on  the  verge 

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BLACKGUARD 

of  feeling  a  slight  communion  with  his  shamefaced 
father.  As  the  mother  went  on  with  her  endless 
story  of  the  father's  crimes  and  incapacities  the 
rubbing  of  her  words  produced  a  glimmer  of  ill- 
temper. 

"Noo,  don't  you  ever  stop  ?"  he  cried.  "Always 
nagging  about  the  past!  I  might  be  a  rich  man 
now  if  you  hadn't  driven  me  crazy  with  your  end- 
less complaints  and  hollering.  Never  a  moment 
of  peace  from  the  day  I  married  you." 

"I'll  have  to  give  both  of  you  something  else  to 
complain  about,"  said  Carl.  "I'm  going  to  stop 
working  for  a  while  and  write  poetry,  and  send  it 
away  to  magazines." 

"Ach,  I  thought  those  writing  notions  were  out 
of  your  head,"  cried  Mrs.  Felman.  "Who  will  buy 
your  good-for-nothing  stuff?  I  can't  understand 
a  word  of  it  myself!  Writing  again!  Will  my 
miseries  never  end?" 

Mr.  Felman  glared  at  his  son  and  the  old  hos- 
tility fell  opaquely  between  them. 

"Between  you  and  your  mother  I'll  be  in  the 
grave  soon!"  he  shouted.    "I'm  done  with  you!" 

He  arose  and  stalked  out  of  the  apartment,  mut- 
tering and  producing  a  loud  period  of  sound  as  he 
closed  the  door. 

94 


BLACKGUARD 

Al  Levy  strolled  into  the  dining  room,  tri- 
umphantly tinkering  with  one  of  the  points  of 
his  small  black  moustache;  lightly  whistling  a 
tune  from  some  latest  musical  comedy ;  and  bear- 
ing upon  his  face  the  look  of  bored  patience  which 
he  assumed  when  in  the  presence  of  an  inferior 
being.  After  he  and  Carl  had  exchanged  con- 
strained "helloes"  he  sat  at  the  table  and  ner- 
vously interested  himself  in  his  cigar,  as  though 
silently  signaling  for  future  words. 

"See  here,  Carl,  I  don't  want  to  butt  in,  and  of 
course,  it's  none  of  my  business,  but  I  couldn't 
help  hearing  some  of  the  argument  that  you've 
just  had  with  your  parents  and  I  want  to  give  you 
a  little  advice,  purely  for  your  own  good.  You're 
on  the  wrong  track,  old  boy.  You're  living  in  a 
world  that  wasn't  made  to  order  for  you  and  you 
can't  change  it.  If  you  don't  bow  to  the  world  the 
old  steam-roller  will  get  you,  and  what  satisfaction 
is  that  going  to  bring  you  ?  This  poetry  of  yours 
is  all  very  well  as  a  side-line,  something  to  fill  in 
the  time  when  you're  not  working,  and  of  course 
it's  very  pretty  stuff.  I  like  to  read  poetry  myself 
sometimes.  But  really  you  shouldn't  take  it  more 
seriously   than   that.     I'm   telling   you   all   this 

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BLACKGUARD 

because  you've  really  got  a  fairly  good  head  on 
you  and  I  hate  to  see  you  go  wrong." 

The  sleekly  loquacious  man  in  front  of  him, 
offering  his  shop-worn  little  adulterations  of 
worldly  wisdom,  aroused  Carl  to  a  lightly  vicious 
mood. 

"You've  wandered  away  from  your  natural 
field,  Levy,"  he  said.  "Talk  about  the  cheap  jew- 
elry that  you  sell,  or  the  physical  merits  of  a 
woman,  or  the  next  candidate  for  mayor,  or  the 
latest  prize-fight,  but  don't  speak  about  something 
that's  simply  an  irritating  mystery  to  you.  You 
know  as  much  about  poetry  as  I  do  about  credits 
and  discounts,  but  you're  a  swaggering,  muddy 
fool  who  imagines  that  the  wisdom  of  the  world 
has  kissed  his  head.  I'm  not  interested  in  you  or 
your  words — you're  simply  five  crude  senses 
dressed  in  a  blue  serge  suit  and  trying  to  scoop  in 
as  much  drooling  pleasure  as  they  can  before  they 
decay.  Go  out  to  your  poolroom  or  down-town 
theater  and  leave  me  in  peace!" 

Levy  gasped  blankly  for  a  moment  and  then 
frowned  with  an  enormous  hatred. 

"Why,  you  stupid  fool,  this  is  the  thanks  I  get 
for  giving  you  a  little  sensible  advice !  "  he  cried. 
"You  think  that  you're  better  than  everyone  else 

96 


BLACKGUARD 

with  all  the  rot  you  write  about  roses  and  love,  but 
let  me  tell  you  something,  a  common  bricklayer 
is  more  important  than  you  are,  any  day  in  the 
year !  A  man  like  that  is  helping  the  progress  of 
the  world  while  you're  nothing  but  a  puffed-up 
little  idler !  And  even  you  have  got  to  do  manual 
labor  because  you're  not  fit  for  anything  else. 
You're  just  a  bag  of  easy  words.  If  it  wasn't  for 
your  parents  I'd  punch  you  in  the  face  and  teach 
you  a  lesson!" 

Mrs.  Felman,  who  had  been  knitting  on  the  rear 
porch,  rushed  into  the  room. 

"Boys,  boys,  stop  it!"  she  cried,  in  anguish. 
"Are  you  out  of  your  minds — fighting  in  the 
house!  Don't  pay  any  attention  to  what  Carl 
says,  Al.  You  know  he's  crazy  and  not  respon- 
sible." 

"Well,  after  all,  you're  right,  I  shouldn't  pay 
any  attention  to  him,"  said  Levy  with  a  sulky 
loftiness.  "I  only  spoke  to  him  for  your  sake, 
you  know,  but  I'll  leave  him  alone  after  this." 

Carl  grimaced  with  the  aid  of  his  eyebrows  and 
suppressed  the  easy  words  with  which  he  could 
have  clubbed  the  man  in  front  of  him.  After 
Levy  departed  Carl  fled  to  the  street  to  escape  his 
mother's  enraged  words  concerning  the  possible 
loss  of  a  valuable  roomer. 

97 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    VIII. 

During  the  next  two  weeks  Carl  sat  in  his 
drably  dark  room,  slowly  copying  his  poems  with 
a  stiff,  perfect  handwriting  and  mailing  them  to 
magazines  and  newspapers,  but  rejection-slips, 
fresh  from  the  printer,  began  to  reach  him  with 
each  return  mail.  Many  of  his  uncertain,  mys- 
tical poems  were  equal  to  the  quality  of  verse 
maintained  by  certain  American  publications,  but 
editors  scarcely  ever  trouble  themselves  to  read 
verse  that  is  copied  in  pen  and  ink  and  bears  the 
spirals  of  deceptively  boyish  handwriting.  Under 
the  blow  of  each  returned  poem  Carl  receded  inch 
by  inch  to  his  old  cell  of  faltering  insignificance. 
He  went  back  to  the  tame  routines  of  physical 
labor,  finding  work  as  a  plumber's  assistant,  and 
still  consoled  himself  by  creeping,  like  a  soiled  and 
weeping  child,  to  Lucy's  blind  and  half-motherly 
worship. 

One  evening,  after  he  had  stepped  into  the 
brightly  dismal  sitting-room  of  Lucy's  home,  he 
noticed  an  uneasy  politeness  in  the  greeting  of 
her  parents — the   usual   well-smeared   cordiality 

98 


BLACKGUARD 

was  absent.  At  first  he  felt  that  he  might  have 
made  a  mistake,  but  one  glance  at  the  nervous 
distress  upon  Lucy's  transparent  little  face  indi- 
cated that  some  change  had  taken  place  in  her 
family's  regard  for  him.  Lucy  was  never  suc- 
cessful in  her  efforts  at  evasion,  and  each  one  of 
the  pitifully  comical  masks  that  she  wore  merely 
snugly  revealed  the  outline  of  the  emotion  which 
they  were  attempting  to  conceal.  With  a  strained 
gaiety  she  suggested  a  walk  and  after  they  had 
reached  the  street  he  questioned  her. 

"Well,  what's  the  trouble.  Luce?  The  graceful, 
January  note  in  your  parent's  voices  was  not 
quite  expected.    Tell  me  what  it's  all  about." 

"Oh,  it's  nothing,  nothing,  Carl  dear." 

"I'm  quite  sure  that  it's  nothing  in  reality, 
since  your  parents  are  almost  incapable  of 
thought,  but  at  any  rate,  you  might  explain  the 
empty  gesture  to  me." 

"Carl,  you're  talking  so  funny  again.  I  adore 
you  when  you  say  things  that  I  can't  understand. 
But,  oh  Carl,  I've  forgotten,  I  mustn't  say  that  to 
you  any  more.  I  mustn't.  You  don't  know  what's 
happened." 

"No,  I  don't.    What  is  it?" 

"Why,  my  father  says  that  he's  convinced  by 

99 


BLACKGUARD 

now  that  your  intentions  to  me  aren't  serious  an' 
he  says  that  he  doesn't  want  me  to  go  with  you 
any  more.  He  says  that  you're  only  triflin'  with 
my  affections  else  you'd  have  asked  me  to  marry 
you  long  ago,  an'  my  mother  says  I  shouldn't  go 
with  you  'cause  you  don't  seem  to  have  any  ambi- 
tion to  rise  in  the  world  an'  'cause  you  haven't 
enough  money  to  support  a  wife.  .  .  .  Gee,  if  you 
knew  the  jawin'  they've  been  givin'  me  for  the 
last  two  nights!" 

"Yes,  but  why  has  all  this  come  so  suddenly?" 
asked  Carl. 

"I  don't  want  to  tell  you,  Carl." 

"You  might  as  well,  Luce.  I  can  see  part  of  it 
on  your  face  now,  because  you  always  talk  best 
when  you're  silent.    Tell  me." 

"Well,  you  know  my  second  cousin  Fred  has 
always  been  runnin'  after  me,  only  I've  always 
been  cool  to  him  because  I  don't  love  him,  of 
course,  but  a  couple  of  nights  ago  he  came  to  my 
father  an'  said  that  he  wanted  to  marry  me  an' 
that  I  wouldn't  have  him.  An'  ever  since  then 
they've  all  been  on  top  of  me!  He's  got  a  store 
on  the  north  side,  a  gents'  furnishing  store,  an'  he 
makes  piles  of  money,  an'  all  my  family  are  just 
crazy  for  me  to  marry  him.    They  say  I'm  just 

100 


BLACKGUARD 

wastin'  my  time  with  you  an'  they've  forbidden 
me  to  see  you  after  tonight." 

Carl  felt  the  incongruous  embrace  of  amuse- 
ment and  compassion  as  he  listened  to  her  simple, 
broken,  troubled  words.  This  thinly  yearning, 
stifled  girl  who  had  folded  him  in  the  arms  of  her 
puzzled  adoration,  was  life  really  on  the  verge  of 
wounding  the  diminutive  misty  mendicant  that 
was  her  heart?  He  felt  helpless,  and  a  little 
guilty  because  he  was  not  as  troubled  as  he  should 
have  been. 

"Do  you  want  to  give  me  up  ?"  he  asked. 

"Carl,  you  know  I  don't!  You  know  it.  But, 
Carl,  you  wouldn't  ever  marry  me,  would  you  ?" 

"No,  I'm  not  the  kind  of  a  person  that  you  ought 
to  marry.  Luce." 

She  was  silent  for  a  time  and  he  watched  her 
with  a  pitying  question.  Had  he  been  unfair  to 
this  poignantly  cringing  child?  Yes,  but  unfair- 
ness was  inevitable  when  people  from  those  differ- 
ent planets  contained  within  an  earth  yield  to  a 
surface  emotional  attraction. 

"Carl,  I've  always  known  that  we'd  hafta  part 
sometime,"  she  said,  "only  I  tried  to  make  believe 
that  I  didn't  know  it.  But  I  did.  We're  too  differ- 
ent from  each  other,  Carl,  an'  you  know  so  much 

lOI 


BLACKGUARD 

more  than  I  do  an'  you're  so  much  better  than  I 
am.  I  wanted  to  hold  on  to  you  'cause  I  wanted 
to  make  you  happy,  but  all  the  time  I  knew  that 
we  wasn't  meant  for  each  other.  0  I  knew  it  so 
well!" 

"I'm  not  in  any  way  better  than  you  are,"  said 
Carl.  "It's  just  that  we  each  want  different 
things  from  the  world.  You  want  to  settle  down 
in  a  home,  and  polish  your  kettles,  and  sing  to 
your  children,  and  blithely  wait  for  your  tired 
husband  every  night,  while  I  want  to  write  fool- 
ish words  on  slips  of  paper  and  escape  from  the 
world  around  me." 

"But,  Carl,  it'll  be  so  hard  for  me  to  leave  you," 
she  said,  in  the  mournful,  dazed  voice  of  one  who 
turns  away  from  a  stone  wall  of  whose  existence 
he  is  not  quite  certain. 

A  tumult  of  frail  inquiries  found  the  corners  of 
her  face  and  lips.  Her  breasts  heaving  beneath 
the  blue  muslin  waist  suggested  the  movements 
of  loosely  despairing  hands.  She  sat  with  Carl 
on  the  grass  of  a  park  and  wept  in  a  barely  audible 
manner  as  though  she  were  intent  upon  giving 
firmer  outlines  to  a  blurred  and  elusive  grief. 
Carl  felt  a  softly  potent  disgust  with  himself  and 
life.  Human  beings — what  did  they  ever  bring 
each  other  except  pain  cunningly  disguised  or 

1 02 


BLACKGUARD 

reaching  for  a  phantom  ecstasy?  Now  he  would 
be  alone  again ;  the  slender  thread  binding  him  to 
animated  life  would  snap;  while  this  child,  who 
held  a  cloud  where  a  brain  should  have  resided, 
would  hide  her  glimpse  of  a  grotesquely  forbidden 
heaven  and  plod  back  to  the  soothing  subterfuges 
of  her  world.  Flitting  lies  seducing  a  black  void 
into  an  attitude  of  false  friendship.  A  stumbling 
urge,  mistaking  its  own  drops  of  perspiring  ardor 
for  permanent,  actual  jewels. 

As  they  stood  upon  the  porch  of  her  home  she 
looked  at  the  darkened  windows  and  then  clutched 
the  lapels  of  his  coat. 

"They're  all  in  bed  now,"  she  whispered.  "Carl, 
I've  got  to  have  you  once  more  before  you  go. 
I've  got  to.  Maybe  I'm  a  bad  girl,  maybe,  I  don't 
know,  but  I  want  to  hold  you  again." 

"This  will  be  the  least  thing  that  I  can  give 
you,"  said  Carl  inaudibly  as  they  sat  upon  the 
hammock.  With  great  care  he  tried  to  form 
within  himself  the  intensity  of  a  despairing  father, 
drawing  the  swift  incense  of  motion  into  a  fare- 
well to  his  child,  in  the  hope  that  she  might  be 
idiotic  enough  to  preserve  it  afterwards  as  a 
tangible  comfort. 

He  closed  his  eyes  as  he  kissed  her,  a  little 
afraid  to  look  into  her  face. 

103 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    IX. 

One  Sunday  morning,  Carl  sat  at  home,  lightly- 
wandering  through  a  newspaper.  On  the  previous 
night  he  had  met  Petersen  and  had  yielded  to  an 
invitation  to  accompany  "two  swell  brunettes 
who  don't  object  to  a  gay  time,"  and  the  recollec- 
tion of  his  violent,  drunken  contortions  came  to 
him  like  a  wierdly  teasing  dream  of  no  particular 
significance  but  leaving  the  temptation  of  nausea 
behind  it.  He  had  released  a  desecrating  ghost 
of  himself  from  the  sneering  recesses  of  his  self- 
despair.  Yes,  you  could  burn  away  the  sensual 
rubbish,  with  derisive  gestures,  but  your  empti- 
ness and  weariness  always  returned  for  their  slow 
revenge.  He  sought  to  put  his  thoughts  to  sleep 
with  the  hasty  versions  of  loves,  catastrophes, 
and  law-suits  that  winked  maliciously  at  him  from 
the  newspaper. 

In  the  middle  of  one  page  he  came  upon  a 
rectangle  of  gossip  concerning  a  poetry  magazine 
of  whose  existence  he  had  never  known,  and 
darting  from  his  insensitive  trance  he  lingered 
greedily  over  the  news.    Through  the  efforts  of 

104 


BLACKGUARD 

an  elderly  poetess  several  society  people  had 
agreed  to  endow  a  small  magazine  that  would  be 
entirely  devoted  to  verse,  and  the  newspaper  item 
was  heralding  the  fact  that  one  of  these  people 
had  contributed  a  sonnet  to  a  recent  issue  of  the 
magazine.  "Mr.  Robert  Endicott,  the  well-known 
clubman  and  member  of  fashionable  sets,  appears 
with  a  delicate  contribution  in  this  month's  issue 
of  The  Poetry  Review,  our  aristocratic  little  maga- 
zine of  the  muse.  This  will  be  a  surprise  to  those 
who  know  Mr.  Endicott  only  in  his  role  of 
business-man  and  society  leader."  Carl  strove  to 
be  properly  impressed  by  the  surprise,  decorating 
it  with  the  Order  of  the  Nasty  Chuckle. 

He  felt  that  it  might  be  consoling  to  receive 
a  rejection  slip  from  an  upper- world  magazine  of 
this  kind — a  dab  of  caviar  on  the  empty  plate — 
and  so  he  sent  them  three  poems.  The  paper 
oblong  came,  but  its  blank  side  held  the  following 
note:  "Dear  Mr.  Felman:  Your  work  interests 
me.  Won't  you  drop  into  the  office  some  time? 
Clara  Messenger." 

What  men  call  triumph  is  a  fanciful  exaltation 
that  may  fall  alike  upon  atoms  and  temples — a 
grandiose  child  of  hope,  whose  mother  is  egoism 
and  whose  father  is  pain.    Men,  whose  life  is  but 

105 


BLACKGUARD 

a  sensitive  or  oblivious  second — a  fleeting  stam- 
pede within  mist — seek  the  absurd  consolation  of 
believing  that  their  work  will  become  immortal, 
and  this  phantom  lie  has  induced  many  a  soldier 
to  writhe  upon  some  trivial  battlefield  and  many 
a  minor  poet  to  fight  with  threats  of  the  gutter, 
Carl  Felman,  obscure,  gasping  struggler,  commun- 
ing with  the  marks  left  by  endless  whips,  felt 
foolishly  thrilled  at  this  first  glimpse  of  personal 
attention  from  a  magazine  and  became  like  a 
swain  to  whom  a  glove  has  been  thrown  from 
an  enticingly  high  balcony.  He  stood  peering  up 
with  a  timid  excitement. 

On  the  following  afternoon  he  managed  to  leave 
the  plumbing  shop,  with  a  plea  of  illness,  and 
raced  to  the  office  of  the  magazine.  A  feathery 
swirl  of  quickly  purchased  emotions — fragments 
of  a  youth  that  had  been  shattered — revolved 
within  his  heart.  As  he  closed  the  door  of  the 
large  office  he  saw  two  women  seated  at  different 
desks  and  poised  over  the  rustle  of  papers.  One 
was  elderly  and  sedate,  and  her  sober  clothes  were 
reprimanding  a  substantial  body.  Beneath  a  sur- 
vival of  greyish-brown  hair,  plainly  gathered,  the 
narrow  oval  of  her  face  looked  at  life  with  a 
politely  questioning  air.     It  was  the  mellowly 

io6 


BLACKGUARD 

distorted  expression  of  one  who  has  arrived  at 
final  convictions  regarding  the  major  parts  of 
life,  and  is  patiently  and  inflexibly  regarding  the 
lesser  perceptions  surrounding  her.  Her  slightly 
wrinkled  face  was  dominated  by  a  long,  thin  nose 
and  thin,  tightly  expectant  lips,  and  it  seemed 
that  her  tired  emotions  had  gone  to  sleep  and 
were  staring  out  from  a  dream  of  suave  wake- 
fulness. The  other  woman  was  hovering  near  the 
last  climax  of  her  youth,  and  her  slender  body 
rose  unobtrusively  to  the  pale  repressions  of  her 
face.  Small  and  round,  her  face  carried  a  well- 
trimmed  self-satisfaction  —  the  reward  of  one 
whose  dreams  have  lived  inwardly,  with  only  an 
occasional  sip  of  forbidden  cordials.  Her  loosely 
parted  lips  guarded  a  receding  chin  and  her  barely 
curved  nose  ascended  to  large  brown  eyes  and  a 
high  forehead. 

Carl  walked  to  her  desk  and  stood  for  a  moment 
like  a  child  in  a  cumbersome  robe  who  is  waiting 
for  some  inevitable  rebuke.  The  harshly  weary 
assurance  which  he  was  able  to  display  to  other 
people  vanished  in  this  imagined  shrine  of  an 
unattained  art.  The  young  woman  looked  up  with 
courteous  blankness. 

"My  name  is  Carl  Felman.  You  wrote  me  a  note 

107 


BLACKGUARD 

last  week,"  said  Carl,  delicately  groping  for  the 
inconsequential  words. 

"Oh,  yes,  I  remember" — her  face  attained  a 
careful  smile,  tempered  by  a  modest  curiosity. 
"I'm  so  glad  that  you  came  down." 

She  turned  to  the  other  woman. 

"Mary,  this  is  Mr.  Felman,  the  gentleman  that 
I  spoke  to  you  about.  He  sent  us  a  rather  inter- 
esting group  of  poems,  you  know." 

Carl  winced  at  the  word  "rather" — it  was  asso- 
ciated to  him  with  "more  or  less,"  "somewhat," 
"somehow,"  and  "to  some  extent,"  those  words 
and  phrases  with  which  cultured  people  manage 
to  say  nothing  and  yet  preserve  the  faint 
appearance  of  saying  something.  His  breathless 
attention  disappeared  and  was  replaced  by  the  old 
morose  aloofness.  If  this  woman  had  asserted 
that  his  poems  were  trivial  or  stifled,  he  would 
have  respected  her,  but  now  he  spat  contemptu- 
ously at  the  smooth  veil  of  her  words. 

Mary  Aldridge,  editor  of  The  Poetry  Review, 
moved  her  lips  into  an  attitude  that  came  within 
a  hair's  breadth  of  being  a  smile — an  expression 
of  slightly  amused  and  restrained  condescension. 
She  lifted  a  pencil  as  though  it  were  an  age-old 
scepter  held  by  practiced  fingers. 

io8 


BLACKGUARD 

"How  do  you  do,  Mr.  Felman,"  she  said. 

Some  people  are  able  to  say  "how  do  you  do" 
in  a  way  that  makes  it  sound  like  "why  are  you 
here?"  and  Carl  inwardly  complimented  her  on 
this  minor  ability  and  said  his  repetition  in  a 
voice  that  made  it  mean  "slip  down,  fathead." 
After  this  exchange  of  vocal  inflections,  part  of 
the  general  vacuity  with  which  human  beings 
greet  each  other  for  the  first  or  last  time,  he 
seated  himself  and  clutched  a  roll  of  manuscripts 
in  the  manner  of  a  father  who  is  frantically 
shielding  his  child  from  some  invisible  danger. 

"I  sent  you  some  poems  which  were  returned, 
but  I  have  some  others  here,"  he  said.  "Perhaps 
you  will  do  me  the  favor  of  reading  them.  I  am, 
of  course,  anxious  to  know  what  may  be  wrong 
with  my  work,  and  also  what  faint  virtues  it  may 
hold.  Sometimes  I  feel  sure  that  I  am  not  a  poet 
and  I  allow  myself  the  luxury  of  becoming  angry 
at  the  persistent  longing  that  makes  me  run  after 
futilities.  Will  you  read  some  of  these  poems  and 
tell  me  whether  I  am  a  fool,  or  a  faltering  pilgrim, 
or  anything  definite?" 

The  abashed  and  yet  softly  incisive  candor 
would  have  unloosened  or  entertained  the  emo- 
tions   of    anyone    except    Mary    Aldridge.     She 

109 


BLACKGUARD 

regarded  him  with  a  coldly  amused  impatience. 

"We-ell,  I'm  very  busy  just  now,"  she  said, 
"but  I'll  glance  through  some  of  your  things.  As 
I  recall,  your  work  had  a  rather  promising  line 
here  and  there." 

He  handed  her  his  roll  and  she  scanned  the 
poems,  thrusting  each  one  aside  with  a  quick 
frown.  She  lingered  a  bit  over  the  last  one,  in 
which  he  had  extracted  a  sleeping  Homer  from 
the  soiled  and  cowering  figure  of  a  blind  Greek 
peddler. 

"M-m,  this  one  isn't  so  bad,"  she  said,  "though 
I  think  that  the  last  lines  are  a  little  forced." 

"If  I  decide  to  alter  them,  will  you  take  the 
poem?"  asked  Carl,  bluntly. 

"Oh,  no,  no,  Mr.  Felman;  your  work  is  by  no 
means  good  enough  for  publication,"  she  answered. 
"I  merely  meant  that  this  poem  in  particular  had 
an  element  of  interest." 

Accustomed  to  blows  of  all  kinds,  Carl  felt 
relieved  that  her  frigid  shroud  had  been  finally 
lifted,  and  with  a  smile  he  reached  for  his  cap. 
Conversation  is  merely  a  tenuous  or  sturdy  pro- 
tection given  to  an  instinctive  like  or  dislike, 
and  with  their  first  words  people  unconsciously 
reveal  the  attitude  toward  each  other  which  they 

no 


BLACKGUABD 

will  afterward  try  to  excuse  and  defend  with 
great  deliberation.  Carl  hated  the  woman  in 
front  of  him,  not  because  she  had  slighted  his 
work,  but  because  she  held  to  him  an  attenuated 
and  brightly  burnished  hypocrisy  that  was  like 
a  shriveled  mask  incessantly  polished  by  her 
words.  He  could  have  imagined  her  stamping 
upon  a  hyacinth  as  though  she  were  conferring 
a  careful  favor  upon  the  petals  and  calyx.  Mary 
Aldridge,  on  her  part,  disliked  the  straight  lines 
of  intent  which  she  could  sense  beneath  his  terse 
questions  and  missed  the  bland  insincerities  of 
those  smoothly  adjusted  postures  known  as  good 
manners.  Life  to  her  was  a  series  of  stiffly 
draped  and  modulated  curves,  violated  only  by 
rare  moments  of  guarded  exasperation  and  anger. 

"Would  you  advise  me  to  stop  writing?"  asked 
Carl. 

"No,  indeed,"  she  answered,  with  her  first  small 
smile.  "Your  work  is  rather  promising  and  you 
seem  to  be  quite  young.  Some  of  it  reminds  me 
of  Arthur  Symons.  Of  course,  I  don't  think  that 
you  will  ever  become  a  great  poet,  but  we  need 
lesser  voices  as  well  as  greater  ones,  you  know." 

"Would  you  mind  if  I  asked  you  to  stop  using 
that  word  ra-ather  and  try  a  little  spontaneous 
directness?"  asked  Carl,  blithely. 

Ill 


BLACKGUARD 

She  rose  suddenly  and  addressed  the  other 
woman,  ignoring  his  words  as  though  they  had 
been  a  trivial  insult. 

"I've  just  remembered  that  I  must  meet  Mr. 
Seeman  at  three,"  she  said.  "Fm  afraid  that  I 
shall  have  to  leave  you  with  this  impulsive  gen- 
tleman." 

Carl  stood  up,  but  the  other  woman  revealed 
with  an  unrestrained  smile  that  she  was  actually 
aware  of  his  presence. 

"Won't  you  stay  awhile?"  she  asked.  "We  can 
talk  a  bit  over  your  work,  if  you  care." 

Carl  looked  at  her  with  suspicion  and  interest 
— a  trace  of  gracious  attention  in  this  place.  He 
resolved  to  explore  the  seeming  phenomenon  and 
settled  back  in  his  chair,  while  Mary  Aldridge, 
with  a  barely  audible  farewell,  walked  out  of  the 
office. 

"Don't  you  think  you  were  a  little  crudely 
sarcastic  in  your  last  remark  to  Miss  Aldridge?" 
asked  Clara  Messenger. 

"I  like  an  axe  sometimes,"  said  Carl,  "although 
I  don't  worship  it  monotonously.  For  certain 
purposes  it  works  far  better  than  the  swifter 
exuberance  of  a  stiletto.  Unless  a  person  is 
unassumingly  frank  to  me  I  don't  feel  that  he 
has  earned  a  delicate  retort." 

112 


BLACKGUARD 

"Why,-  it's  impossible  to  live  in  the  world  with 
a  code  like  that.  One  would  have  to  become  a 
hermit." 

"No,  even  hermits  are  never  absolutely  isolated. 
Living  on  another  planet  would  be  the  only  rem- 
edy, I  guess." 

"What  a  curious,  lunging  person  you  are !  But 
you  shouldn't  have  minded  Miss  Aldridge  so  much. 
She's  always  afraid  that  if  she  openly  encourages 
a  young  poet  he'll  imagine  that  he's  a  genius." 

"That's  a  harmless  trick  of  imagination  and  it 
doesn't  need  any  encouragement  or  censure.  It's 
a  shade  better,  perhaps,  than  imagining  that  you 
are  a  fool." 

"What  an  old-young  person  you  are.  When  you 
talk  I  feel  that  I'm  listening  to  an  insolent  essay. 
I'm  not  so  sure  that  a  poet  doesn't  need  praise. 
It's  part  of  his  task  to  change  the  polite  praise 
around  him  to  an  understanding  appreciation,  and 
that  can  be  very  necessary  and  exciting." 

"To  a  poet  the  appreciation  of  other  people 
must  be  like  a  glass  of  lukewarm  wine  taken  after 
work,"  said  Carl. 

"Well,  I  know  that  it  means  a  great  deal  to 
me,"  said  Clara  Messenger.  "It  reassures  me  that 
Fm  speaking  to  the  hearts  and  minds  of  the 

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BLACKGUARD 

people  around  me  and  I'd  feel  very  unimportant 
if  at  least  a  few  people  didn't  like  my  work.  One 
can't  live  in  a  vacuum,  after  all." 

"No  ?  I've  done  it  for  five  years  or  so.  I  think 
that  all  of  us  secretly  live  in  vacuums,  but  we 
use  our  imaginations  to  conceal  that  fact.  Words 
were  really  invented  to  hide  this  essential  empti- 
ness." 

"You're  a  massive  pessimist!  The  strangest 
man  of  twenty-three  that  I've  ever  seen!  If 
things  are  so  utterly  hollow  to  you,  why  do  you 
live?" 

"In  order  to  persuade  myself  that  I  have  a 
reason  for  living — a  defiant  entertainment  in  the 
presence  of  an  empty  theater.  .  But  it's  always 
futile  to  defend  your  reason  for  living.  Tell  me, 
instead,  what  do  you  think  of  your  associate.  Miss 
Aldridge?" 

"I  really  think  that  she  treated  you  a  little 
heartlessly,  but  at  the  same  time  I  don't  think 
that  she  meant  to,"  said  Clara.  "Mary  is  a  woman 
who  grew  into  the  habit  of  hiding  herself  from 
people  because  so  many  of  those  who  looked  at 
her  youth,  at  one  time,  failed  to  understand  it." 

"I  can  understand  that  process,  though  I  don't 
believe  that  it  applies  in  her  case.     It's  a  slow 

114 


BLACKGUARD 

and  sullen  withdrawing  from  the  jibing  strangers 
around  you — a  wounded  desire  to  meet  their  walls 
of  misunderstanding  with  even  harder  walls  of 
your  own.  As  you  grow  older,  I  suppose,  the 
sullenness  may  change  to  a  well-mannered  and 
hopeless  aloofness.  Age  softens  the  attitude  and, 
still  self-immersed,  it  seeks  the  distraction  of 
words." 

"What  has  happened  to  make  you  say  this?" 
asked  Clara,  with  a  mistily  maternal  impulse. 

"Just  now  I'm  working  in  a  plumber's  shop, 
helping  the  sewers  with  their  sluggish  germs  of 
future  turbulence,"  said  Carl,  "and  that,  of  course, 
can  play  its  part  in  the  making  of  a  pessimist.  . 
But  tell  me  what  you  think  of  my  work?" 

"Plumbing  or  poetry?" 

"Both  of  them  are  interwoven." 

"Your  poems  are  stiff  and  dimly  tinted,  like  a 
row  of  plaster-of-paris  dolls  standing  on  a  dusty 
and  venerated  shelf.  Don't  you  see?  You  talk 
about  twenty  times  better  than  you  write,  and 
I  can't  understand  this  peculiar  incongruity. 
Perhaps  you've  been  taught  that  poetry  is  some- 
thing that  must  be  ethereal  and  noble  at  all  costs, 
and  perhaps  you've  been  inarticulate  because  the 
rest  of  you  has  been  at  war  with  this  one  illusion. 

115 


BLACKGUARD 

I  don't  feel  that  you've  looked  upon  poetry  as 
a  place  where  you  could  expr.ess  your  actual 
thoughts  and  feelings." 

When  a  man  has  been  intangibly  blind  for  a 
long  time,  he  usually  stumbles  at  last,  accidentally, 
upon  an  incident  or  challenge  that  makes  him 
totter  on  the  edge  of  vision,  and  in  that  moment 
it  is  revealed  whether  this  blindness  has  been 
innate  or  not.  If  he  wavers,  then  his  lack  of 
sight  has  been  an  artificial  ailment,  and  if  his 
first  reaction  after  the  stumble  is  one  of  stubborn 
irritation  his  tightly-shut  eyes  are  not  apt  to 
open.  Carl  felt,  without  quite  being  able  to  shape 
the  picture,  that  he  was  walking  out  of  a  sublime 
bric-a-brac  shop,  and  yet  the  contact  of  him,  left 
behind  in  the  shop,  continued  to  speak  with  his 
words.  As  he  discussed  poetry  with  Clara  he 
began  slowly  to  feel  that  he  had  been  a  minute 
and  prisoned  fool,  although  his  words  writhed  in 
an  effort  to  escape  an  absolute  admission.  She 
gave  him  practical  scoldings,  also,  concerning 
the  exact  way  in  which  manuscripts  should  be 
submitted  to  editors,  and  he  listened  with  the 
amusement  that  a  man  feels  when  he  suddenly 
sees  that  he  has  been  walking  along  a  street  with 
his  shoes  unlaced.    She  gave  him,  again  and  again, 

ii6 


BLACKGUARD 

her  hazily  maternal  smile  in  which  sensual  desires 
selfishly  clothed  themselves  in  an  ancient  and 
soothing  dress  known  as  kindness. 

"I  do  hope  that  I've  helped  you,"  she  said.  "I'd 
like  to  feel  that  I've  aided  someone  to  discover 
his  real  self." 

When  he  returned  to  his  room  he  applied  a 
match  to  everything  that  he  had  ever  written  and 
watched  the  flaming  pile  of  papers  with  an  emo- 
tion in  which  dread,  tenderness,  and  elation  were 
oddly  contending  against  each  other.   These  bits 
of  paper,  with  their  symbols  of  shimmering  con- 
fusion, had  been  decorated  by  the  sweat  of  his 
body,  the  brittle  despair  of  his  heart,  and  the 
anger  of  his  soul,  and  their  death  brought  him 
a  helpless  and  jumbled  sadness;  but  gradually 
another  reaction  began  to  possess  him.  The  naked 
quivers  of  a  fighter,  crouched  in  the  plan  of  his 
first  blow,  centered  around  his  heart,  and  all  of 
the  thoughts  within  his  mind  gave  one  shout  in 
unison — a  meaningless   hurrah   just  before   the 
first  leap  of  a  creative  battle.     During  the  next 
two  months  he  wrote  with  an  insane  speed,  and 
all  of  his  thoughts  and  emotions  rushed  out  in 
an  irresistible,  nondescript  mob  scene — a  French 
Revolution  swinging  its  torches  and  howls  against 

117 


BLACKGUARD 

every  repression  and  constraint  within  him.  Good, 
bad,  and  mediocre,  they  rain  in  the  circles  of  a 
celebrated  revenge,  and  his  main  purpose  was 
expressed  in  these  first  four  lines  of  one  of  his 
poems : 

You  have  escaped  the  comedy 

Of  swift,  pretentious  praise  and  blame, 
And  smashed  a  tavern  where  they  sell 
The  harlot's  wine  that  men  call  fame. 


ii8 


^ARTII 
THE  KNIFE 


BLACKGUARD 


TKe  Knife 

CHAPTER    X. 


ITH  Clara  Messenger  as  his  guide, 
Carl  began  to  discover  that 
another  world  nestled  between  the 
dull  apartment  houses,  raucous 
markets,  and  underworld  saloons 
which  had  confined  his  body — a 
world  of  smoother  parlors  and  studios,  in  which 
stood  "poets,"  painters,  sculptors,  novelists,  critics, 
Little  Theater  actors,  art  patrons,  students  of  the 
arts,  all  leading  their  little  squads  of  camp  follow- 
ers or  plodding  methodically  in  the  ranks.  This 
world  was  swaggering  and  overheated,  and  within 
it  hosts  of  minor  people  were  raising  their  falter- 
ing or  blissfully  insincere  prayers  to  a  god  with 
a  thousand  faces,  whom  they  called  Artistic 
Expression — a  god  of  astigmatic  egoism  dressed 
in  cautious  shades  of  emotion  and  thought,  and 
obsessed  with  a  fear  of  irony  and  originality. 
Carl  felt  like  an  emancipated  hermit  suddenly 


121 


BLACKGUARD 

thrown  as  a  sacrifice  to  an  uproar  of  contending 
philosophies  and  artistic  creeds.  His  mind,  accus- 
tomed to  solitary  decisions,  became  bewildered 
amidst  the  bloodless,  tin-sword  battle  around  him 
and  he  wondered  how  he  could  possibly  make  hig 
own  voice  heard  in  the  egoistic  din.  Each  man 
assured  him  that  the  other  man  was  a  fool  or 
a  charlatan,  and  he  listened  to  their  conflicting 
assumptions  of  wisdom  with  a  naive  dismay. 

"What  has  lured  these  people  into  their  atti- 
tudes of  isolated  and  weary  superiority?"  he 
asked  himself,  "and  if  the  attitudes  are  genuine, 
why  do  these  people  make  a  garrulous  religion 
of  attacking  each  other  ?  If  they  actually  believed 
that  their  convictions  were  mountain  ranges,  with 
some  snow  of  immortality  soft  beneath  their  feet, 
they  would  dwell  with  a  more  pensive  calmness 
upon  these  substantial  protests,  instead  of  assidu- 
ously pelting  each  other  with  flecks  of  mud  in 
the  valleys." 

With  the  melancholy  idealism  of  his  youth 
Carl  had  made  an  emotional  sketch  in  which 
artists  and  writers  were  a  band  of  profoundly 
misunderstood  martyrs,  clinging  to  each  other  as 
they  accepted  the  indifference  and  ridicule  of  a 

• 

practical  world,  and  he  was  amazed  to  find  that 

122 


BLACKGUARD  I 

almost  all  of  them  were  far  too  easy  to  under- 
stand, and  thronged  with  shudders  of  words  at 
the  idea  of  clinging  to  one  another.  Like  an 
array  of  famished  and  animated  housewives,  they 
traded  gaiety  and  friendly  argument  while  in 
each  other's  presence,  while  in  secret  they  carved 
each  other  with  gossiping  exaggerations,  three- 
penny sneers,  and  every  hair's-breadth  edge  of 
derision.  Even  among  their  different  "schools" 
and  cliques  he  found  little  fusion — the  members 
of  each  group  were  plotting  to  unseat  their  leader 
because  they  had  commenced  to  fear  that  he  was 
merely  using  them  as  a  step-ladder. 

This  trivial  drama,  with  malice  performing 
menial  duties  in  the  service  of  the  old,  egoistic 
dream  of  immortal  expression  and  emotional  tall- 
ness,  was  a  new  reality  to  Carl  and  he  surveyed 
it  with  an  alert  contempt. 

"Why  all  of  this  clownish,  papier-mache  melo- 
drama, with  words  playing  the  part  of  overworked 
murderers?"  he  asked  himself.  "Is  it  possible 
that  faint  voices  whisper  within  these  people  that 
they  are  not  as  important  and  all-seeing  as  they 
would  like  to  be?  Most  ludicrous  tragedy!  The 
noise,  alas,  must  ever  continue,  since  their  doubts 
and  fears  require  a  constant  pounding.     Poor, 

123 


BLACKGUARD 

astounding  people !  .  .  .  The  critic,  stroking  his 
suave  patter  above  a  tea-table:  'Oh,  yes,  Mr.  X. 
is  a  very  sound  man,  very  sound.'  'Mr.  C.  is  indeed 
a  great  poet,  for  there's  a  certain  simplicity  and 
sincerity  in  everything  he  does.'  'Mr.  E.  is  amaz- 
ingly clever  and  erudite — a  most  important  man.' 
'Mr.  B.  ?  I'm  afraid  that  he's  only  a  minor  Baude- 
laire, you  know,  the  old  morbid  straining  after 
originality' — this  critic  is  merely  allowing  his 
thoughts  and  emotions  to  perform  their  private 
functions  upon  the  publicity  of  a  fanciful  pedestal, 
to  retch,  relieve  themselves  of  fluids  and  rubbishes, 
and  scratch  their  smarts.  It  is,  in  truth,  a  weird, 
prolonged  indecency." 

He  meditated  upon  his  own  relation  to  this 
explanation  of  the  belligerent  waste  of  energy 
around  him. 

"I  am  a  better  egoist  than  the  people  around 
me,"  he  said.  "I  will  not  be  forced  to  display 
my  private  organs  as  often  as  they.  Only  an 
absolute  egoist  can  afford  to  be  calm  and  more 
obscurely  naked.  If  I  indulge,  at  rare  intervals, 
a  secret  grin  will  gain  its  reward." 

His  thoughts  had  mounted  these  conclusions 
as  he  sat  one  night  in  Clara's  studio,  with  his 
legs  tucked  in  above  a  scarlet  cushion.    She  looked 

124 


BLACKGUARD 

at  him  with  a  petulant  question  on  her  face. 

"Carl,  why  are  you  forever  arousing  the  enmity 
of  people?"  she  asked. 

"Because  I  detest  most  of  them ;  because  I  like 
straight  lines  and  angles  in  conduct  while  they 
prefer  curves  and  circles ;  and  for  a  variety  of  rea- 
sons." 

"But,  Carl,  you  don't  need  to  be  so  deliberate 
about  antagonizing  people." 

"I'm  not.  I'm  simply  myself  most  of  the  time — 
a  difficult  task,  but  it  can  be  achieved." 

"Well,  everybody  is  sneering  at  your  latest 
stunt.  Why,  oh  why,  did  you  have  to  parade  down 
Scott  street  smoking  that  long  Chinese  pipe  of 
yours,  with  a  red  ribbon  tied  to  the  stem?  Carl, 
sometimes  I  almost  believe  that  you  love  to  pose !" 

"I  ain't  guilty,  I  swear  it.  When  that  group  of 
my  poems  came  out  in  the  big  eastern  magazine 
I  simply  felt  that  the  event  demanded  an  un- 
ashamed celebration.  It  was  like  the  christening 
of  a  healthy  child  and  I  wanted  something 
stronger  than  whiskey  or  wine.  An  odd  longing 
that  comes  to  me  sometimes.  I  decided  to  commit 
the  inexplicable  crime  of  becoming  immersed  in 
a  new  toy  of  motion.  I  fitted  a  rubber  mouth- 
piece over  the  tip  of  the  pipe  and  used  it  half  of 

125 


BLACKGUARD 

the  time  as  a  cane.  I've  been  told  that  a  crov/d  fol- 
lowed me  but  I  didn't  turn  my  head  to  investi- 
gate." 

"Well,  everyone  has  heard  about  it  and  they're 
all  calling  you  a  cheap  little  poseur.  And,  really, 
I  don't  know  that  they're  wrong.  I  never  felt  so 
angry  in  my  life.  You  love  to  attract  the  attention 
of  other  people  and  you'll  make  every  kind  of  ex- 
cuse rather  than  admit  this  fact!" 

He  showed  an  outburst  of  surface  anger. 

"You  can  act  more  impulsively  in  a  camp  of 
lumber-jacks  than  before  a  crowd  of  so-called 
artists  and  writers,"  he  said.  "The  lumber-jacks 
might  regard  you  with  a  simple  amazement,  or  an 
unrestrained  laughter,  but  at  least  they'd  grant 
you  the  sincerity  of  insanity!  Since  I  must 
choose  between  stupid  people  I  prefer  the  more 
roughly  natural  ones." 

"I'm  tired  of  hearing  you  call  everybody  a  hypo- 
crite," said  Clara.  "It's  just  a  nice  way  that  you 
have  of  defending  your  own  actions !" 

He  arose  and  reached  for  his  cap. 

"I'll  leave  you  to  this  weariness,"  he  said  an- 
grily. "It  may  be  possible  that,  as  I  walk  down 
the  street,  no  one  will  believe  that  I'm  striding 
along  in  a  highly  deliberate  manner.  The  thought 
is  pleasant." 

126 


BLACKGUARD 

"Carl,  don't  be  foolish,"  she  said,  half-repen- 
tantly,  but  without  answering  he  walked  out  of 
the  studio. 

This  had  not  been  his  first  quarrel  with  Clara, 
and  the  frequency  of  their  collisions,  always  fol- 
lowed by  a  skirmish  of  nervous  laughter,  made 
him  believe  that  they  were  both  stupidly  postpon- 
ing a  sure  separation.  Clara  was,  in  her  entire 
essence,  a  deft  Puritan  industriously  beating  the 
back  of  a  frightened  Pagan.  At  certain  intervals 
the  Pagan  arose  and  knocked  the  Puritan  uncon- 
scious but  the  latter  always  gradually  revived  and 
resumed  its  dulcet  mastership,  and  Clara  liked  or 
disliked  Carl  whenever  her  inner  situation  shifted 
in  these  ways.  Carl  had  grown  weary  of  being 
alternately  punched  and  caressed  by  her  moods. 
He  had  long  since  realized  that  his  relations  with 
her  were  merely  the  playthings  of  a  fluctuating 
emotional  response  and  that  neither  he  nor  she 
had  the  slightest  respect  for  each  other's  habits 
and  minds,  and  on  this  evening,  as  he  walked 
down  the  street  after  leaving  her  studio  he  knew 
that  the  uncertain  pretence  of  drama  had  ended. 

He  had  slowly  discovered  that  almost  all  of  the 
people  around  him,  with  their  different  versions 
of  culture  and  art — those  two  realities  hidden  by 

127 


BLACKGUARD 

mincing  courtezans  of  egoism — were  distrustful 
of  bluntness  and  gay  impulse  in  conduct  and  had 
made  a  word  known  as  "unconventional,"  in  order 
to  defend  the  ordinary  fright  that  governed  their 
actions.  A  venerable  contradiction  among  these 
minor  people  but  one  that  had  held  new  outlines 
for  him.  He  had  also  learned  that  most  of  these 
people  were  so  accustomed  to  masquerades  that 
they  could  not  believe  in  the  reality  of  a  care- 
lessly naked  attitude  and  usually  mistook  it  for  a 
dazzling  and  ingenious  pose. 


128 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XI. 

Filled  with  these  gloomy  realities  he  walked 
down  a  roughly  bright  street  where  the  under- 
world tiptoed  furtively  between  the  ranks  of  semi- 
respectable  working-people — a  street  of  gaping, 
sleekly  sinister  saloons,  cabarets,  small,  thickly 
tawdry  shops,  and  cheap,  cofRn-like  hotels  and 
apartment  houses.  The  hour  was  early — nine  p. 
m. — and  he  walked  slowly,  engaged  in  his  favorite 
pastime  of  watching  the  shrouded  haste  of  crowds. 
As  he  passed  a  moving-picture  theater,  dotted 
with  greasy  electric  lights  and  plastered  with  in- 
anely gaudy  posters,  he  felt  a  light  hand  on  his 
shoulder.  He  turned  and  saw  Lucy  standing  be- 
fore him.  The  sight  gave  him  a  friendly  shock, 
for  on  this  evening  he  was  tired  of  clever  hypoc- 
risies and  longed  for  anything  that  would  be  crude 
and  unassuming. 

"Lucy,  have  you  fallen  down  from  some  sky?" 
he  asked. 

"No,  I  just  came  out  of  the  theater  here  an' 
saw  you  walkin'  by.  Gee,  but  I'm  glad  I  did !  It's 
been  a  year  now  since  we've  seen  each  other, 

129 


BLACKGUARD 

hasn't  it?  An'  I  never,  never  thought  I'd  meet 
you  again." 

"Well,  what  has  happened  to  you,  Luce?"  he 
asked  as  they  walked  down  the  street  together. 

"I'm  married  to  Fred  now.  I  didn't  see  any- 
thing else  to  do  after  you  left,  and  all  of  my  folks 
just  pushed  me  into  it.  'Nen  besides  I  was  tired  of 
workin'  in  that  darn  store.    Tired." 

"Are  you  less  tired  now  ?    Happy  ?" 

"Mm,  Fred's  an  awful  nice  man  in  his  way  an' 
I  s'pose  I  oughta  be  happy.  He  really  loves  me, 
Fred  does,  an'  he  don't  seem  to  lose  his  temper  the 
way  some  men  do.  ,  'Course,  he's  a  little  stingy 
with  money  but  then  I  s'pose  he's  tryin'  to  look 
out  for  the  future." 

"Do  you  love  him  now.  Luce?" 

Her  head  drooped  a  little  and  she  was  silent  for 
a  time. 

"I  guess  it's  terrible  of  me  not  to  love  him, 
after  all  he's  done  for  me,  but  I  just  don't.  I 
always  keep  rememberin'  all  of  your  funny  ways 
an'  all  the  time  we  was  together  an'  I  feel  ashamed 
of  it  too  'cause  it's  kinda  like  not  bein'  true  to 
Fred,  but  I  can't  help  it.  There's  been  times  when 
I've  managed  to  forget  about  you  but  they  don't 
last  long  enough." 

130 


BLACKGUARD 

He  tried  to  make  himself  feel  like  a  helpless 
knave  as  he  listened  to  this  simple  child  of  earth 
who  longed  for  the  palely  inexplicable  god  before 
whom  she  had  once  grovelled  in  rhythmic  speech- 
lessness. He  had  taken  all  of  her  eager  silences, 
pardoned  by  the  damp  understanding  of  flesh,  and 
bestowed  upon  her  in  return  nothing  save  the 
blurred  vision  of  thoughts  and  emotions  which  it 
would  have  been  useless  for  her  to  understand,  and 
the  tantalizing  fantasy  of  his  embraces.  If  he 
had  stayed  with  her  he  would  have  mutilated, 
kicked,  and  evaded  every  longing  and  purpose  of 
his  life  while  she  would  have  revelled  in  happi- 
ness. Walking  down  this  street  were  thousands 
of  people,  trying  to  embalm  a  softly  sensual  hour 
with  the  fluids  and  devices  of  bravely  stupid  lies, 
and  inventing  words — "honor,"  "respectability" — 
to  conceal  the  grotesquely  snickering  effect  of 
their  lives.  Life  was,  indeed,  an  insipid  mounte- 
bank! 

"Luce,  I  ought  to  feel  like  a  selfish  dog,  for  if  I 
did,  then  at  least  I  could  give  you  a  belated 
shoulder  to  cry  upon,"  he  said.  "We're  different 
persons,  that  doesn't  need  to  be  said,  but  still  I'm 
sorry  at  times  that  we  parted.  I  need  your  stu- 
pidity." 

"Do  you  still  care  for  me,  Carl?" 
131 


BLACKGUARD 

"There  are  times  when  I  want  you  again.  You 
brought  me  a  delicate  dumbness  which  I  could 
change  into  any  kind  of  speech,  with  my  fingers 
and  words.  Your  simplicity  doesn't  swagger,  or 
point  admiringly  to  itself,  and  I  like  that.  Just 
now  I  am  surrounded  by  people  who  are  not  dif- 
ferent from  you  except  that  they  have  memorized 
three  or  four  thousand  words  more,  and  use  them 
with  a  moderate  degree  of  cunning.  Your  silences 
are  much  better." 

"I'm  not  always  silent  'cause  I  don't  understand 
what  you  say.  Sometimes  I  do  understand,  but  I 
keep  quiet  'cause  I  don't  know  how  to  tell  you 
about  it." 

They  turned  down  a  side-street  and  he  looked 
questioningly  at  her. 

"Aren't  you  afraid  that  Fred  may  see  us  to- 
gether?" he  asked. 

k"I  forgot  to  tell  you.  He  left  this  afternoon  for 
Pittsburg,  to  see  his  mother,  an'  he'll  be  gone  for 
two  weeks.    I'm  all  alone  now." 

That  conversing  silence,  in  which  a  suggestion 
is  so  strongly  felt  that  it  need  not  be  heard,  was 
released  from  both  of  them  and  remained  until 
they  reached  the  apartment  building  in  which  she 
lived,  and  stood  in  the  dark  hallway. 

132 


BLACKGUARD 

"I  don't  want  to  leave  you  now" — ^her  whisper 
was  frightened  but  stubbornly  tender.  "I  don't 
want  to.  For  all  I  know  I  may  never  see  you  again 
and  if  I  don't  I've  got  to  have  somethin'  that  I  can 
hold  on  to.  Somethin'  that's  not  as  foolish  as  just 
talkin'  words.  .  .  I'm  a  dreadful  girl,  I  s'pose.  I 
must  be  very  wicked.  I  must  be.  .  .  But  I  don't 
care.    Please  don't  go  away." 

They  stood  in  the  hallway  like  two  dizzy,  bur- 
dened children  feeling  the  advancing  shadow  of 
an  irresistible  action  and  yet  waiting  for  the  exact 
moment  when  all  deliberate  words  would  vanish. 
Until  their  minds  were  quite  free  of  words 
their  limbs  could  not  move.  Suddenly  they  both 
mounted  the  stairway,  hand  in  hand,  as  though  a 
kindly  demon  had  decided  to  make  playthings  of 
their  legs. 

When  Carl  left  the  apartment  building  early  on 
the  following  morning  and  hurried  to  the  suburban 
cigar-store  where  he  now  worked  half  of  the  day 
as  a  clerk,  his  old  self-disgust  was  absent  and  a 
cleanly  wild  lightness  took  his  limbs,  as  if  he  had 
slept  upon  the  plain  sturdiness  of  a  hillside  and 
was  pacing  away  with  the  borrowed  vigor. 

"The  only  time  that  I  dislike  earth  is  when  it 
is  dressed  in  urgent  mud,  adulterated  perfumes, 

133 


BLACKGUARD 

strained  lies,  and  repentant  fears,"  he  told  him- 
self as  he  walked  through  the  bustling  shallow- 
ness of  each  city  street. 

Before  leaving  Lucy  he  had  promised  to  return 
on  the  following  night,  and  when  she  had  wept 
and  begged  him  "not  to  think  that  she  was  a  ter- 
ribly bad  girl,"  he  had  laughed  softly  and  dropped 
his  lips  upon  her  tears. 

"You  have  been  yourself,  Luce,  and  since  the 
world  is  always  conspiring  against  such  an  arbi- 
trary occurrence,  you  can  give  yourself  a  bewil- 
dered congratulation,"  he  told  her,  gayly. 

Without  understanding  his  words  she  had  felt 
the  presence  of  defiant  sounds  which  had  cheered 
her.  During  the  next  two  weeks,  as  he  remained 
with  her  each  night,  he  reflected  upon  the  possible 
melodrama  that  lurked  just  outside  of  his  visits. 

"If  her  husband  suddenly  returns  and  finds  me 
with  her  he'll  want  to  kill  me,"  he  said  to  himself 
once,  as  though  he  welcomed  the  idea.  "He'll  feel 
that  only  my  death  could  heal  his  injured  vanity 
— vermilion  medicine! — but,  of  course,  instead  of 
admitting  that  to  himself  he'll  find  an  accommo- 
dating phrase  to  hide  the  actual  motive,  such  as 
'avenging  his  honor,'  'killing  a  treacherous 
hound,'  'defending  the  family,'  etc.     The  news- 

134 


BLACKGUARD 

papers  are  full  of  such  charming  episodes,  well 
fortified  by  words,  for  without  words  to  obliterate 
his  motives  man  would  perish  in  a  day.  Melo- 
drama is  the  only  real  sincerity  that  life  holds — 
the  one  surprising  directness  in  a  world  of  false 
and  prearranged  contortions.  Perhaps  I  could 
ravish  my  fears  and  welcome  it.  I  don't  know,  and 
no  one  can  until  it  actually  arrives." 

But  the  two  weeks  died  without  the  blundering 
interruption  of  drama,  and  Lucy  and  Carl  parted 
on  the  last  morning  with  a  chuckling  stoicism — 
tears  and  the  syllables  of  laughter  are  always 
similar — the  madcap  protest  of  a  last  kiss — lips 
and  tongues  intent  upon  a  future  compensation — 
and  a  final  flitting  of  hands.  They  had  slapped  in 
the  face  a  violent  shadow  known  as  life  and  now 
it  would  take  a  fancifully  piercing  revenge.  They 
had  attained  a  quality  known  as  bravery — a  qual- 
ity that  is  only  fear  rising  to  a  moment  and  effect- 
ively sneering  at  itself. 


135 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XII. 

Carl  returned  to  the  minor,  suavely  gesturing 
groups  of  hypocrites  in  the  city  in  which  he  lived, 
and  in  going  back  to  this  "art  and  literary  world" 
he  had  the  feeling  of  one  who  had  deserted  a 
strong  valley  of  desire  to  enter  a  stilted  room 
filled  with  imitation  orchids,  valiantly  empty 
words,  and  malice  dressed  in  clumsy,  velvet  cos- 
tumes. This  reaction  was  still  dominating  him 
as  he  sat,  one  afternoon,  in  the  office  of  a  magazine 
called  "Art  and  Life,"  perched  upon  a  window-sill 
and  looking  down  at  the  black  and  dwarfed  con- 
fusion of  a  street. 

This  office  was  a  gathering  place  for  several 
young  writers,  each  of  whom  fondled  his  pet  rebel- 
lion against  conservative  standards,  and  they 
clustered  around  the  anxiously  seraphic  face  of 
Martha  Apperson,  the  young  editor,  and  seriously 
fought  for  the  treason  of  her  smiles.  She  was  a 
tall,  sturdily  slender  woman  with  a  blithely  sym- 
metrical swerve  to  her  body,  and  the  natural  pink- 
ness  of  her  face  parted  into  the  curves  of  a  lightly 
distressed  and  virginal  doll.    Her  blue-gray  eyes 

136 


BLACKGUARD 

were  looking  at  life  with  a  startled  incredulity — 
the  gaze  of  one  who  has  been  tempted  to  regard 
a  sometimes  merry,  but  more  often  vaguely  sor- 
rowful picture-puzzle.  Life  to  her  was  a  rapidly 
taunting  mixture  of  glints,  hints,  undertones,  sur- 
face blooms,  fleeting  tints,  portentous  shadows 
with  little  shape  to  them,  broken  images,  and 
misty  heights,  and  she  was  forever  trying  to  lure 
them  all  into  a  cohesive  whole  by  striding  from  one 
philosophy  and  creed  to  another,  adding  another 
stride  every  three  or  four  months.  At  such  times 
she  would  appear  at  her  office  and  enthusiastically 
assure  her  audience  that  she  had  finally  accomp- 
lished the  almost  obscene  miracle  of  penetrating 
the  depths  of  human  existence.  She  had  started 
her  magazine  as  a  strident  protest  against  "the 
people  who  live  conventionally,  steeped  in  a  vicious 
comfort  that  binds  their  imaginations  and  ruins 
their  legs  and  arms,"  and  its  pages  made  an  awk- 
wardly weird  combination  of  sophomoric  revolts, 
longings  for  "beauty  and  splendor" — those  easily 
bought  thrones  for  the  importarice  of  youth — and 
enraged  yelps  against  traditions  and  conventions, 
with  here  and  there  a  more  satirically  detached 
note  from  Carl  and  two  other  men.  Carl  knew 
that  he  wanted  her  body  because  it  was  the  only 

137 


BLACKGUARD 

mystery  that  she  seemed  to  possess  and  because 
he  wondered  whether  it  might  not  be  able  to  make 
her  thoughts  less  obvious.  Her  mind  was  a  stumb- 
ling jest  to  him  and  her  jerkily  volatile  pretences 
of  emotion  failed  to  cleave  him. 

He  began  to  turn  his  eyes  impatiently  toward 
the  office  door.  Martha  had  left  him  in  charge, 
promising  to  return  in  an  hour,  but  he  knew  that 
her  hours  were  frequently  afternoons  as  she  ca- 
vorted around  the  city,  throwing  out  miniature 
whirlwinds  of  appeals  for  money  and  attention. 
In  a  corner  of  the  office  stood  a  huge  photograph 
of  her  latest  god — a  middle-aged,  hawk-faced  lec- 
turer from  England — that  fertile  land  from 
whence  all  lecturers  flow — a  man  who  had  recently 
startled  the  city  by  speaking  on  Oscar  Wilde, 
dressed  in  a  black  robe  and  standing  in  a  chamber 
dimly  disgraced  by  candles,  incense,  and  muslin 
poppies.  The  theatrically  savage  features  of  this 
man  rested  beneath  a  framed  letter  from  a  promi- 
nent writer — one  of  those  abortions  in  which  the 
great  man  tells  a  small  magazine  that  he  earnestly 
hopes  that  it  will  amount  to  something  and 
believes  that  it  can  accomplish  a  great  purpose  if 
it  pursues  the  ideals  which  have  illuminated  his 
work.    Carl's  eyes  sought  this  framed  joke  for  the 

138 


BLACKGUARD 

hundredth  time,  since  his  mood  needed  such  arti- 
ficial humor  to  make  it  less  aware  of  itself,  and  at 
this  moment  Martha  came  with  the  rapid  gait 
of  one  who  is  returning  to  vast  and  uncompleted 
tasks,  although  her  day's  labors  were  at  an  end. 
This  was  not  a  pose  but  merely  a  bouncing  over- 
abundance of  energy.  With  her  was  Helen  Wilber, , 
a  young  disciple  who  scarcely  ever  left  her  side. 
Helen  had  fled  from  a  wealthy  family  in  another 
city  and  traded  her  debutante's  excuse  for  the 
more  fanciful  robe  of  an  ecstatic  pilgrim  starting 
to  ascend  from  the  base  of  veiled  mountains  of 
expression.  She  darted  about  on  errands  and  in- 
terviews and  felt  the  humble  fervors  of  a  novice 
— a  tall,  heavy  girl  with  a  long,  soberly  undevel- 
oped face  and  abruptly  turned  features  that  were 
garlanded  with  freckles.  She  had  made  a  fine  art 
of  her  determination  to  persuade  herself  that  she 
was  masculine,  giving  it  the  intense  paraphernalia 
of  stolen  words  and  gestures,  but  beneath  her 
dubiously  mannish  attire  and  desperately  swing- 
ing limbs  the  desires  of  an  average  woman  were 
feebly  questioning  the  validity  of  her  days.  She 
greeted  Carl  with  her  usual  ringing  assumption  of 
boyishness. 

"Hello,  old  top!   Been  waiting  long?" 
139 


BLACKGUARD 

"Not  as  long  as  I  expected  to  wait,  considering 
Martha's  superb  indifference  to  the  impudence  of 
time.  Well,  Martha,  how  have  you  been  insult- 
ing actualities — with  your  usual  crescendoes  of 
insanity  ?" 

Martha  reached  for  the  device  of  quickly  slid- 
ing the  tip  of  her  tongue  over  her  upper  lip,  a 
movement  that  always  gave  its  opiate  to  her  em- 
barrassment or  dismay,  and  then  smiled  with  a 
softly  tragic  aloofness. 

"Oh,  people  weary  me  so!"  she  said.  "They're  so 
impossible  most  of  the  time  and  so  sublimely  un- 
aware of  that  fact!  I've  just  come  from  seeing 
an  elderly  woman  who  said  that  she  might  be  in- 
terested in  helping  us.  She  was  fat  and  expen- 
sively gowned  and  she  wanted  to  know  whether 
we  wouldn't  print  a  story  about  the  historical  old 
families  of  this  city  and  how  they  had  founded  a 
great,  commercial  and  romantic  fabric.  I  told  her 
that  we  were  concerned  with  the  restless  and 
flaming  present,  with  the  artists  and  thinkers  of 
our  own  time,  and  not  with  respectable  trades- 
people of  the  past.  Of  course  I  put  it  as  nicely  as 
I  could  but  she  flew  into  a  temper  and  said  I  was 
insulting  the  people  who  had  built  up  a  great  and 
mighty  city.   .   .    0  people  are  so  impossible!" 

140 


BLACKGUARD 

Carl  envied  the  excited  flow  of  her  words  and 
wished  that  he  could  also  feverishly  felicitate  his 
emptiness  at  that  particular  moment. 

"I  felt  like  telling  her  that  men  who've  made 
money  and  put  up  ugly  buildings  aren't  necessar- 
ily important  enough  to  talk  about,"  said  Helen, 
with  a  hollow  seriousness,  "but  of  course  I  didn't 
for  fear  of  hurting  Mart's  chances." 

"I  get  so  tired  of  wasting  words  on  people  who 
lead  monotonous  lives  and  can't  see  the  variety 
and  beauty  within  life,"  said  Martha.  "When  you 
talk  to  them  they  treat  you  as  though  you  were 
a  little,  misbehaving  girl  who  would  soon  be 
spanked  and  put  to  bed.  '0  you'll  soon  get  over  all 
of  this  artistic  nonsense,'  they  say." 

"Ah,  they  can't  see  that  a  defiance  like  yours, 
Mart,  is  a  fire  that  only  grows  stronger  when 
someone  tries  to  put  it  out,"  said  Helen  with  a 
spontaneously  rhetorical  worship. 

Carl  grinned  at  the  dramatic  sincerity  with 
which  these  two  women  lunged  at  colossal  targets. 

"What's  all  of  this  endless  stuff  about  beauty  ?" 
he  asked.  "Beauty,  beauty,  I'm  tired  of  the  label. 
No  specific  description  but  just  a  nice,  sonorous 
word.  You  might  exalt  your  loves  and  punish 
your  aversions  with  a  little  more  clarity." 

141 


BLACKGUARD 

"0  you  can't  diagram  it  as  though  it  were  a 
problem  in  mathematics !"  cried  Martha.  "It's  too 
big  and  mysterious  for  that.  You  simply  know  it 
when  you  see  it.  It  quickens  your  breath  and 
drops  like  music  upon  your  soul.  It's  the  thing 
that  makes  you  know  that  you  have  a  soul — the 
radiant  weariness  that  springs  from  everything 
that  is  strong,  and  lonely,  and  delicate,  and  elus- 
ive, and  tortured." 

"The  adjectives  are  stirring  and  the  fact  that 
they  happen  to  be  meaningless  is  of  little  impor- 
tance," said  Carl.  "I  like  the  way  in  which  you 
make  love  to  your  emotions." 

Martha  gave  a  grimace  of  exasperation. 

"You're  the  most  insincere  man  I  know,"  she 
said.  "Some  day  I'll  fall  in  love  with  a  man  who 
can  be  sincerely  brilliant  and  beautiful  and  who 
doesn't  put  his  words  together  carefully,  as 
though  they  were  unimportant  toys." 

"Such  a  fate  may  be  exactly  what  you  deserve," 
said  Carl,  still  grinning. 

"Here  we've  been  tramping  around  all  day,  see- 
ing stupid  people,  and  you  waste  Mart's  time  with 
your  old  arguments  about  beauty  and  words," 
said  Helen  with  a  jocose  disgust.  "I'm  getting 
famished.    Let's  go  home." 

142 


BLACKGUARD 

"I  forgot  to  tell  you,  Carl — I'm  having  a  party 
at  the  apartment  this  evening,"  said  Martha. 
"That  strange,  interesting  Russian  you  met  yes- 
terday is  coming — Alfred  Kone.  And  Jarvin  who 
runs  the  literary  page  on  the  Dispatch.  You'll 
come  with  us  now,  won't  you?" 

"Yes,  I'm  interested  in  Kone.  He  carries  a  cer- 
tain revolving  electricity  around  with  him.  His 
words  and  gestures  are  abruptly  flashing  like 
showers  of  sparks.  I'm  almost  tempted  to  find  out 
where  the  sparks  come  from." 

"He's  a  natural  pagan,"  said  Martha  with  an  ad- 
miring sigh.  "Don't  you  love  that  European  air 
about  him  1  It's  something  that  you  wouldn't  like 
if  you  could  put  your  finger  on  it — something 
elusive  and  graceful,  and  sophisticated." 

"Is  it  possible  that  you  mean  that  Kone  is  intri- 
cately redundant?"  said  Carl,  carelessly. 

"Carl,  you  always  talk  in  such  a  careful,  un- 
earthly way,"  said  Helen,  with  a  combat  of  irrita- 
tion and  wonder  in  her  voice. 

"With  most  people  talk  is  a  weak,  thin  wine," 
said  Carl.  "They  drink  endless  cups  of  it  and  at 
last  they  become  mildly  intoxicated.  I  prefer  to 
achieve  drunkenness  with  less  effort." 

The  incongruous  love-song  of  the  conversation 

143 


BLACKGUARD 

continued  as  they  departed  for  the  Apperson 
apartment.  Carl  became  morbidly  jovial  as 
though  striving  to  goad  himself  into  a  mood,  but 
underneath  his  v^ords  he  w^as  sad  as  he  side- 
stepped Helen's  heavy  lunges.  "I  have  never 
actually  had  youth — that  glistening  mixture  of 
blunders,  sighs,  cruel  laughters,  and  a  pleasant 
sadness  that  does  not  cut  too  deeply,"  he  said  to 
himself  as  he  listened  to  the  obviously  proud  youth 
of  the  two  women. 


144 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    Xril. 

Kone  had  already  arrived  at  the  apartment  and 
was  waiting  on  the  front  porch.  His  heavy  body, 
of  medium  height,  held  the  arrogant  bulge  of 
muscles  beneath  his  light  grey  suit  and  his  pale 
brown  face  cradled  a  wraith  of  bitter  alertness — 
a  sneer  attempting  to  break  through  the  conceal- 
ing flesh.  He  had  a  short  flattened  nose,  thick 
lips,  and  the  eyes  of  a  forced  and  sprightly  demon, 
and  the  dark  abundance  of  his  eyebrows  receded 
into  a  low  forehead,  which  in  turn  ended  in  a  mass 
of  black  hair  brushed  backward.  He  had  come 
to  America  some  six  years  before  this  late  Au- 
tumn evening;  had  first  worked  as  a  porter  in  a 
department  store;  had  mastered  English  with  a 
miraculous  speed;  and  was  now  studying  at  a 
neighboring  university  and  earning  a  living  by 
teaching  Russian  to  classes  of  children.  In  place 
of  that  violently  disguised  boredom  commonly 
known  as  a  heart  he  seemed  to  have  an  over- 
perfect  dynamo  that  made  him  a  mechanical  wild- 
man — there  was  a  sharp,  strained  persistency  in 
all  of  his  movements  and  the  fact  that  he  never 

145 


BLACKGUARD 

deigned  to  falter  in  his  words  and  gestures  gave 
him  an  aspect  of  well-maintained  artificiality.  He 
threw  his  vivid  grin  to  Carl. 

"Hah,  poet  who  seems  to  sleep  but  is  always 
awake — greetings,"  he  called  out,  in  the  crisply 
dramatic  way  in  which  he  usually  spoke.  "  'De- 
mons lurk  in  your  dimples' — you  should  have  writ- 
ten that  line  about  yourself." 

"Portraits  are  merely  pretexts — secret  portraits 
of  oneself  tortuously  extracted  from  the  blankness 
of  other  people,"  said  Carl. 

"You  would  like  to  believe  that.  The  involved 
egoism  of  youth!" 

"It  might  be  proving  your  case  to  answer  you," 
said  Carl,  laughing. 

Kone  was  one  of  the  few  men  who  could  make 
him  laugh,  since  he  had  the  odd  habit  of  laughing 
only  in  praise  and  scarcely  ever  in  derision — a  cus- 
tom bom  in  the  loneliness  of  his  former  years. 
Kone  greeted  Martha,  who  came  in  later,  with 
words  in  which  an  adroitly  raised  respect  and 
daring  sensuality  were  carefully  mixed,  but, 
although  her  surface  was  flattered  by  his  obei- 
sance, his  attentions  failed  to  penetrate  her  radi- 
ant self-immersion.  That  would  have  been  a  feat 
worthy  of  century-old  preservation.    She  listened, 

146 


BLACKGUARD 

like  a  convinced  and  mysterious  referee,  while 
Kone  and  Carl  indulged  in  the  precise  uselessness 
of  argument — a  discussion  on  whether  Dostoevsky 
was  an  insane  mystic,  drunk  with  the  details  of 
reality,  or  an  emotional  search-light  stopping  at 
the  edge  of  the  world.  The  talk  led  to  a  question 
of  the  exact  value  of  originality. 

"So,  you  are  looking  for  originality,"  said  Kone 
with  a  metallic  mockery  in  his  voice.  "A  man  may 
stand  on  his  head  without  in  any  way  disturbing 
the  universe.  Has  it  not  occurred  to  you  that  life 
is  only  a  series  of  reiterations  beneath  the  trans- 
parent gowns  of  egoism?" 

"I  prefer  the  gowns  when  they  are  a  little  less 
transparent.  I  might  also  have  to  know  why  a 
man  was  standing  on  his  head  before  I  could  make 
any  conjecture  concerning  the  agitation  of  the 
universe" — an  amused  respect  was  in  Carl's  voice. 
He  liked  the  stilted  lunges  of  Kone. 

Helen  appeared  in  the  doorway. 

"Put  your  daggers  aside  for  a  while  and  come  to 
dinner,"  she  said,  with  the  most  benign  of  toler- 
ances. 

After  the  meal  Arthur  Jarvin,  the  critic,  arrived 
with  a  woman  named  Edith  Colson.  Jarvin  was 
almost  tall — one  of  many  "almosts"  composing 

147 


BLACKGUARD 

his  entirety — and  the  plump  old  rose  oval  of  his 
face  showed  its  immense  self-satisfaction  beneath 
a  fluffy  mat  of  dark  brown  hair.  He  wore  spec- 
tacles and  his  features  bore  the  petulant  satisfac- 
tion of  one  who  has  eaten  too  much  for  breakfast 
and  has  not  quite  decided  whether  to  regret  that 
fact  or  not.  Since  he  held  a  contempt  for  the  mad 
limitations  of  time  he  always  fondly  lengthened 
the  utterance  of  his  many  "howevers"  and  "not- 
withstandings."  His  friend,  Edith  Colson,  was  a 
tall,  slender  woman  who  freed  a  satirical  vivacity 
with  each  of  her  words,  thus  making  one  regret 
the  fact  that  she  had  nothing  to  say.  One  felt 
that  to  herself  she  was  intrenched  upon  modest 
but  well-guarded  hill-tops  of  emotion ;  that,  being 
thinly  perverse,  she  had  purchased  her  castles  in 
Norway  and  scorned  the  more  treacherous  anima- 
tions of  a  warmer  climate.  Her  icy  effervescences 
— whirls  of  powdered  snows — sometimes  subsided 
to  a  softer  note  which  told  you  that  the  dab  of 
warmth  left  within  her  was  reserved  for  a  select 
two  or  three  beings,  and  that  her  conversation 
was  an  elaborate  form  of  repentance.  Outwardly 
she  offered  the  effect  of  a  carefully  ornamented 
self-protection.  The  greenish  brown  length  of 
her  face  accepted  the  problems  of  a  long  straight 

148 


BLACKGUARD 

nose,  loosely  thin  lips,  and  large  black  eyes,  and 
was  topped  by  a  disciplined  wealth  of  brownish 
black  hair. 

They  sat  in  a  circle  on  the  porch  and  the  conver- 
sation skipped  with  too  much  ease  between  recent 
books,  plays,  and  local  celebrities  among  writers 
and  artists.  Jarvin,  full  of  the  books  that  had 
come  to  him  for  reviewing  purposes,  compared 
and  dissected  them  with  the  air  of  a  professor  who 
boredly  but  genially  lectures  to  his  special  class. 
"This  book  was  passable:  of  course  it  couldn't 
come  up  to  so-and-so's  book.  This  other  one — well, 
not  quite  as  good  as  his  last  novel.  A  little  too 
much  of  one  style,  you  know.  That  new  French- 
man? Yes,  they're  raising  quite  a  fuss  over  him. 
Grim,  cruel  stuff,  but  well  done.  Those  books  lose 
a  lot  in  the  translations,  though.  That  new  poet? 
Mm,  he's  lyrical  enough  but  he  just  misses  inspir- 
ation. The  new  crop  will  have  to  go  a  long  way 
before  they  can  approach  Shelley  or  Wordsworth. 
Have  you  seen  the  new  Shaw  play  at  the  Olympic  ? 
After  all,  Shaw  is  one  of  the  few  men  who  can 
make  you  laugh  without  being  vulgar  or  obvious," 
etc. 

Carl  sat  in  silence  and  rearranged,  in  his  head, 
the  difficult  line  of  a  new  poem,  and  to  his  im- 

149 


BLACKGUARD 

mersion  the  conversation  had  become  a  slightly 
irritating  and  well-memorized  murmur.  Endlessly 
he  muttered  to  himself:  "your  face  is  stencilled 
with  a  pensiveness.  .  .  .  pensiveness  .  .  .  but  I 
need  another  adjective." 

Kone  ruffled  the  dulcet  informations  of  the  oth- 
ers now  and  then  with  a  polite  but  ironical  jest 
that  was  never  too  obviously  at  their  expense; 
Martha  preserved  her  eagerly  listening  silence; 
and  Helen  sat  like  a  dazed  woman  at  a  verbal  ban- 
quet, scarcely  daring  to  touch  the  glittering  food 
in  front  of  her.  Finally  Jarvin  found  Carl's  direc- 
tion with  a  question  that  jerked  him  back  to  the 
gathering  although  the  exact  words  eluded  him. 

"What  were  you  saying?  I  haven't  been  listen- 
ing," said  Carl. 

"That's  an  insulting  confession"  —  Edith  Col- 
son's  voice  snapped  like  a  succession  of  breaking 
wires.    "Aren't  you  interested  in  books  ?" 

"Well,  not  in  the  broad  and  detailed  way  in 
which  they  seem  to  interest  the  rest  of  you,"  said 
Carl,  with  the  sleepily  candid  smile  which  usually 
made  another  person  long  to  investigate  the  resil- 
iency of  his  throat.  "Once  every  five  months  I 
read  one  that  should  be  spoken  of  with  great  ve- 
hemence and  then  gradually  forgotten,  but  that's 
a  rare  occurrence." 

150 


BLACKGUARD 

"O  come,  that's  an  easy,  superior  attitude,"  said 
Jarvin.  "Come  down  to  the  valley  and  join  us, 
Mr.  Poet!" 

"All  right,  I'm  down.  I've  passed  your  hills  of 
judicial  comment  and  reached  the  moonlight  on 
the  street  pavement  outside.  It  suggests  a  con- 
test. Suppose  we  all  make  up  a  line  describing 
the  moonlight  on  the  street — the  moonlight  that 
falls  like  a  quiet  silver  derision  on  all  philosophies 
— and  we'll  see  which  of  us  is  best  acquainted  with 
the  penitent  promise  of  words.  I'll  begin.  "The 
moonlight  repressed  the  grey  street,  like  a  phan- 
tom virtue."  Only  original  lines — nothing  from 
books." 

"Here  I  am  in  the  midst  of  a  talk  on  Bergson, 
and  this  young  poet  asks  me  to  make  up  some 
pretty  lines  about  the  moon,"  said  Jarvin,  in  a 
voice  of  poised  scorn.  "I  read  enough  about  the 
moon  in  the  flood  of  mushy  poetry  that  pours  into 
my  office." 

"You  might  try  to  describe  it  yourself,"  said 
Carl.  "In  that  way  you  could  provide  an  excel- 
lent antidote  for  your  disgust.  It  is,  I  assure  you, 
an  important  task  to  rescue  the  moon  from  the 
rape  of  trite  words." 

"No,  I'll  leave  that  to  minor  poets,"  said  Jarvin. 

151 


BLACKGUARD 

Carl  gave  him  the  malicious  grin  of  one  who  is 
enjoying  a  sham  battle. 

"If  the  moon  doesn't  satisfy  you,  Mr.  Jarvin, 
let's  try  that  whispering  prison  of  trees  just  out- 
side of  this  window,  or  the  people  who  place  their 
unsearching  feet  upon  streets  every  day.  Any- 
thing except  voluble  shop-talk  about  the  latest 
mediocrities  with  now  and  then  a  philosopher  or 
scientist  thrown  in  for  purposes  of  repentance  and 
caution." 

"Well,  our  young  iconoclast  even  scorns  philos- 
ophy," said  Jarvin.  "Perhaps  it  speaks  with  too 
much  thought  and  authority  to  suit  your  fancy. 
It's  much  easier  to  let  your  emotions  juggle 
words." 

"Philosophy  is  a  bottle-faced  dwarf  drowning 
with  imposing  howls  in  an  ocean  that  does  not  see 
him,"  said  Carl,  with  a  languid  lack  of  interest. 
"But  philosophy  should  be  read,  if  only  with  a 
careful  indifference." 

Jarvin  threw  another  rock,  with  haste,  and  Carl 
gave  him  another  epigram.  Kone,  always  a  res- 
tive audience,  interposed. 

"The  anarchist,  Pearlman,  has  just  come  to 
town,"  he  said.  "Perhaps  all  of  you  know  that  he 
served  twenty  years  in  prison  for  attempting  to 
kill  a  millionaire.    A  cruel  penance !" 

152 


BLACKGUARD 

"I  become  rather  tired  of  these  anarchists  who 
are  forever  trying  and  plotting  to  blow  up  the 
city-hall,"  said  Edith.  "They're  neither  artists 
nor  dull,  useful  citizens  and  they  serve  no  purpose 
that  I  can  see.  If  they  imagine  that  they  can 
change  the  present  system  of  things  by  shrieking 
and  murdering  people  they  ought  to  be  sent  to  a 
school  for  the  feeble-minded." 

"I'm  not  so  sure  that  I'd  want  to  see  things 
radically  changed,"  said  Jarvin.  "Of  course  I 
know  that  there's  a  great  deal  of  graft  and  injus- 
tice everywhere  but  I'm  not  sure  that  I'd  care  to 
live  in  a  Utopia — wickedness  and  cruelty  are  far 
more  interesting." 

"The  trouble  with  these  anarchists  and  social- 
ists is  that  they  miss  all  the  beauty  in  life,"  said 
Martha.  "If  you  show  them  a  painting  or  a  poem 
they  think  that  you're  trying  to  waste  their  time, 
unless  it  contains  a  social  message." 

"I  think  that  it's  cruel  and  useless  to  try  to  take 
another  man's  life,"  said  Helen,  earnestly.  "I  hate 
this  fellow,  Pearlman!" 

Kone  listened  to  this  stagnant  symposium  of 
viewpoints,  with  a  patient  sneer. 

"In  Russia  we  are  more  accustomed  to  murder," 
he  said.    "We  have  not  attained  the — what  shall  I 

153 


BLACKGUARD 

say? — the  genial  and  practical  compromises  of 
your  American  democracy.  In  our  country,  alas, 
oppression  takes  off  its  mask  and  swings  a  red 
sword!  If  you  will  realize  that  death  does  not 
hold  for  us  the  mysterious  terror  that  it  holds  for 
you  it  may  help  you  to  understand  Pearlman.  He 
came  to  this  country — a  young  Russian — senti- 
mental, idealistic,  crowded  with  naive  longings 
for  martyrdom.  He  wanted  to  die  for  the  people — 
that  grand,  massive,  mysterious,  and  yet  near  and 
real  people!  When  he  tried  to  kill  a  millionaire, 
who  was  stubbornly  refusing  to  arbitrate  with  his 
striking  men,  Pearlman  was  choked  with  a  poem 
of  liberation  that  could  not  be  denied.  Then  the 
icy  reality  of  his  next  twenty  years — condemned 
by  both  society  and  the  strikers  whom  he  had 
tried  to  help,  surrounded  by  the  rigid  leer  of  iron 
bars;  and  squeezed  into  a  niche  of  futility  .  . 
This  crucified  Russian  does  not  need  your  sarcasm, 
my  friends." 

The  conversation  staggered  and  scampered  for 
another  hour,  with  everyone  save  Carl  animatedly 
endeavoring  to  conceal  the  fact  that  he  was  in  no 
way  interested  in  anyone's  opinions  except  his 
own,  and  at  last  the  party  packed  away  its  come- 
dies, irritations,  and  convictions,  and  arose  from 

154 


BLACKGUARD 

the  chairs.  There  were  farewells,  with  just  the 
right  compound  of  gaiety  and  caution,  and  the 
gathering  separated. 

Carl  and  Alfred  Kone  went  to  the  latter's  room 
in  a  dormitory  at  the  university  and  sat  until  an 
early  hour  of  the  morning,  arguing  with  an  in- 
tensity that  made  their  tobacco  smoke  seem  a 
cloud  of  gunpowder.  Kone  was  that  tense  incon- 
gruity— an  ironical  sentimentalist.  Within  him, 
emotion  cajoled  thought  to  a  softer  brutality  and 
thought  intruded  its  staccato,  exploring  note  upon 
the  limpid  abandon  of  emotion.  A  deliberate 
friendship  rose  between  these  men,  like  a  translu- 
cent wall  through  which  men  can  see  each  other 
without  touching,  for  each  one  knew  that  the 
other  held  a  baffling  insincerity  of  imagination 
and  was  afraid  that  he  might  be  deftly  ridiculed 
if  he  failed  to  measure  his  words.  Kone  admired 
the  nimble  restlessness  of  Carl,  a  quahty  which  he 
was  compelled  mechanically  to  imitate,  while  Carl 
liked  the  explosive  way  in  which  Kone  evaded  him- 
self. Kone  was  now  almost  thirty  years  old  but 
his  machine-like  capering  made  him  seem  much 
younger  and  he  bounded  through  life  like  a  sophis- 
ticated street-urchin,  swindling  himself  with 
fiercely  endurable  makeshifts    in    place    of   dead 

155 


BLACKGUARD 

dreams.  His  tragedy  rested  in  the  fact  that  he 
was  not  a  creator  and  the  knowledge  of  this  was 
to  him  a  secret  poison  from  which  he  had  to  escape 
with  many  a  gale  of  make-believe  laughter. 


156 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XIV. 

One  afternoon,  four  months  after  the  Apperson 
party,  Carl,  Kone,  and  Jenesco,  a  Roumanian 
painter,  sat  in  the  latter's  little  blending  of  studio 
and  bedroom  and  looked  at  a  landscape  which  he 
had  just  finished.  Jenesco's  eyes  lazily  flirted 
with  triumph  and  his  small,  ruddy  face  displayed 
the  expression  of  a  child  throwing  a  few  last,  un- 
necessary grains  upon  a  sand-hill. 

"Boys,  what  do  you  think  of  it  ?"  he  asked  in  a 
tone  of  confident  fatherhood. 

Kone  and  Carl  scanned  the  painting.  It  was  a 
mother-goose  transfiguration,  too  quick  in  its  ac- 
ceptance of  violent  colors  and  bearing  a  blandly 
forced  simplicity.  Red,  indigo,  and  orange  trees 
were  lining  both  sides  of  a  road,  and  the  trees 
were  painted  in  such  a  manner  that  they  seemed 
to  be  kneeling  at  the  roadside.  In  the  distance 
white  mountains,  resembling  the  suggestion  of 
upturned  cups,  refused  the  blue  wine  of  sky,  and 
in  front  of  them  were  fields  that  looked  like 
wrinkled,  green  tablecloths  spread  out  to  dry.    In 

iS7 


BLACKGUARD 

the  sky  one  large  pink  cloud  forlornly  squandered 
its  innocence. 

"Pleasant — pleasant,"  said  Kone.  "Not  realis- 
tic, and  not  fantastic.  It  deceives  both  of  its  mis- 
tresses." 

"You  don't  see  what  I'm  trying  to  get  at,"  ans- 
wered Jenesco.  "I'm  trying  to  make  reality  turn 
an  amiable  somersault,  as  Carl  would  say.  I  want 
to  avoid  the  two  extremes  of  painting  the  usual 
photograph  on  the  one  hand  and  making  some- 
thing that  no  one  can  understand  on  the  other." 

Carl  listened  to  the  seething  argument  that  fol- 
lowed, with  the  feelings  of  one  who  hears  an  ex- 
quisitely worthless  routine  of  sound.  He  was 
always  amazed  at  the  fact  that  people  could  argue 
about  art — a  word  pilfered  from  that  last  desper- 
ate undulation  with  which  an  ego  decorates  the 
slavery  of  mud.  Arguments  on  art  to  him  were 
like  the  antics  of  a  sign-painter  defending  the 
precious  label  which  he  has  painted  upon  certain 
of  the  more  indiscreet  and  impossible  longings 
within  him — a  piece  of  inflexible  nonsense.  He 
felt  that  works  of  art  so-called  could  be  described 
and  admired  with  a  novel  and  independently  crea- 
tive bow  of  words,  but  never  defended  and  ex- 
plained.   Books  on  art  were  to  him  a  futile  and 

158 


BLACKGUARD 

microscopical  attempt  to  inject  logic  into  a  deco- 
rative curiosity.  As  he  listened  to  the  wrestling 
sounds  of  the  present  argument,  words  within  him 
began  to  flatter  his  indifference. 

"While  Kone  is  talking,  Jenesco  sits,  trying  to 
frame  his  reply  and  paying  little  heed  to  Kone's 
words,"  he  said  to  himself.  "If  Jenesco  hears  a 
point  that  he  has  not  previously  considered  he  will 
make  a  hasty  attempt  to  shift  his  answer — a  quick 
sword-thrust  at  the  new  opponent — and  then  pro- 
ceed to  forget  about  the  matter.  Serious  argu- 
ments might  be  of  value  if  they  were  not  windy 
and  elaborate.  If  men  could  decide  to  condense 
their  views  into  neat  typewritten  sheets,  carried 
in  a  coat  pocket  and  distributed  among  people, 
they  could  save  a  great  deal  of  cheated  energy." 

"The  poet  has  been  sitting  here  like  an  amused 
statue,"  said  Kone,  after  the  argument  had  col- 
lapsed to  the  usual  stand  still.  "Come,  we  are 
waiting  for  you  to  flay  us." 

"Splendid.  Another  tense  battle.  Haven't  you 
had  enough?"  said  Carl.  "I  would  suggest  that 
we  hold  a  debate  on  whether  that  spider  on  the 
wall  will  crawl  into  the  sunlight  near  the  window, 
or  whether  it  will  remain  in  the  shade.  In  this 
way  we  can  speculate  upon  how  much  the  laws  of 

159 


BLACKGUARD 

chance  may  alter  the  spider's  conception  of  the 
universe." 

"Get  away  with  that  satirical  pose!"  cried 
Jenesco. 

Carl  smiled  without  answering,  while  the  others 
derided  his  self-immersion.  Jenesco  knew  no  other 
weapon  save  an  emotional  club.  He  was  a  machin- 
ist who  had  taken  up  painting  two  years  before 
this  late  winter  afternoon  and  he  still  kept  a  little 
shop  where  he  occasionally  sold  and  repaired  ma- 
chines. This  combination  of  rough  mechanic  and 
art-desiring  man  had  given  its  surface  lure  to 
Carl's  imagination  and  he  had  commenced  to  spend 
most  of  his  time  at  Jenesco 's  home.  Short,  and 
with  the  body  of  a  subdued,  light-weight  prize- 
fighter, Jenesco  was  a  small  hurricane  of  physical 
elations.  He  had  the  face  of  a  corrupted  cherub 
that  had  sold  its  innocence  to  mental  inanities,  and 
his  mind  was  a  conceited  confusion  of  naive  ideas. 
He  had  been  attracted  to  painting  because  it 
brought  his  hands  into  motion,  thus  encouraging 
the  habit  which  they  could  not  forget  after  their 
working  hours,  and  because  it  taught  color  and 
flexibility  to  the  hard  greys,  browns,  and  blacks 
of  his  daily  toil.  He  belonged  to  that  band  of  men 
who  spend  a  lifetime  in  stubbornly  walking  down 

i6o 


BLACKGUARD 

a  road  of  artistic  effort  which  does  not  lead  them 
to  any  distinct  surrender.  Their  imaginations  are 
not  weak  enough  to  kneel  before  the  drab  regulari- 
ties of  life  and  not  strong  enough  to  escape  from 
the  instinctive  push  of  dead  men's  realities. 

From  that  afternoon  on,  Carl  began  to  see  more 
of  Jenesco  and  less  of  Kone.  Kone  was  not  a  crea- 
tor but  merely  transposed,  with  a  hungry  fire,  the 
sentences  of  other  men,  and  after  you  solved  the 
snapping  tricks  with  which  he  did  this,  his  ironies 
became  thin  and  lamely  transparent.  Carl  pre- 
ferred the  wolfish  wit  with  which  Jenesco,  an 
ogling  Proletarian,  tore  silk  and  satin  from  the 
shrinking  flesh  of  obvious  hypocrisies  in  life.  It 
was  at  least  a  lurching  circus  of  words — a  pulsat- 
ing buffoonery.  He  scarcely  ever  saw  Martha  now, 
since  their  self-immersions  tended  to  create  a 
sterile  restraint  between  them,  with  words  and 
hands  playing  the  part  of  irrelevant  intruders. 
Each  of  them  secretly  despised  life  and  its  people, 
while  giving  a  pretended  attention,  but  they  used 
different  methods.  Martha  fluttered  her  emotional 
veils,  with  a  breathless  coercion,  while  Carl  dodged 
beneath  a  carnival  of  grotesquely  mated  words. 

To  amuse  the  secret  loneliness  which  often  be- 
came a  boring  acid  he  formed,  with  Jenesco,  that 

i6i 


BLACKGUARD 

hollow  melee  known  as  a  debating  club;  called  it 
"The  Questioners" — prodded  by  a  ghost  of  humor 
— and  exhibited  his  words  in  the  formal  vaude- 
ville-show. The  performances  occurred  at  the 
studio  of  a  man  named  Fyodor  Murovitch,  a  young 
Polish  sculptor  with  a  softly  melodramatic  abund- 
ance of  dark  brown  hair  and  the  face  of  a 
strangely  waspish  saint — a  saint  who  was  tempt- 
ing himself  with  malices  in  order  to  conquer  them. 
One  evening  Carl  sat  in  this  place,  drained  by  the 
empty  ritual  of  responding  to  noisy  and  firmly 
convinced  people  and  ogling  his  nerves  with  the 
rhythm  of  pipe  smoke.  He  looked  up  and  saw 
a  woman — Olga  Ramely — standing  beside  him. 
His  eyes  experimented  with  the  eyes  of  this 
stranger  and  suddenly  contracted.  Her  eyes 
seemed  to  be  two  drops  of  quivering  sweat  left 
behind  by  an  emotional  crucifixion.  They  were  sen- 
sitive with  essences.  Greyish-green,  larger  than  a 
dwindled  sky,  lost  in  a  perilous  dream  of  wakeful- 
ness, holding  the  phantom  glow  of  incredible  tor- 
tures, friendly  to  mental  recklessness,  they  were 
like  a  ludicrously  clever  imitation  of  his  own  eyes 
and  he  trembled  in  the  presence  of  an  inexplicable 
deception.  His  imagination  was  becoming  a  de- 
tached devil  much  in  need  of  correction.  Olga 
Ramely  spoke  to  him. 

162 


BLACKGUARD 

"I've  been  watching  you  all  evening.  The  light 
from  the  candles  over  your  head  fell  upon  your 
yellow  hair  and  put  shadows  on  your  face.  The 
shadows  gave  your  face  a  soft  excuse  and  you 
looked  half  like  a  sprite  and  half  like  a  martyr. 
There  was  an  indelicately  impish  weariness  on 
your  face.  Your  hair  was  like  light,  and  in  one 
glistening  attempt  it  tried  to  reach  the  weariness, 
but  couldn't.  I  told  myself  that  you  were  not  the 
man  that  people  say  you  are." 

He  made  his  peace  with  her  eyes,  moved  by  a 
profound  embarrassment,  and  discovered  the  rest 
of  her  face,  with  an  abject  and  yet  faintly  skep- 
tical desire.  The  surface  flattery  of  her  words  had 
been  almost  without  meaning  to  him,  but  her  voice 
had  given  him  a  problem — deep  with  an  alto 
scheme,  like  a  trailing  memory  of  pain,  and  quiv- 
ering rebelliously  under  the  disciplines  of  thought. 
He  examined  her  face  for  an  affirmation  of  the 
voice.  Short,  dark  brown  curls  encumbered  her 
head,  like  a  wig  of  lost  thoughts  undulating  in  an 
effort  to  capture  reality,  and  her  skin  was  the 
smoothly  troubled  fusion  of  white  and  brown. 
Her  nose  was  of  moderate  length  and  curved 
slightly  outward,  in  a  subdued  question  of  flesh; 
her  lips  were  small  and  thin — pliant  devices  of 

163 


BLACKGUARD 

doubt — and  a  tight  survival  of  plumpness  upon 
her  face  told  of  a  lucidly  cherubic  effect  that  had 
existed  before  life  dropped  its  hands  heavily  upon 
her.  Her  body,  verging  on  tallness,  was  immersed 
in  a  last  skirmish  with  youth. 

"What  have  you  heard  them  say  about  me?" 
he  asked,  craving  the  evasion  of  words  that  would 
conceal  a  unique  tumult  within  him. 

"I've  heard  people  say  that  you  were  a  thief, 
and  a  rascal,  and  a  disagreeable  idiot,  and  a 
poseur,  and  a  liar,  and  an  overwhelming  egoist." 

"What  did  you  think  of  this  dime-novel  version 
of  iniquity?" 

"I  have  been,  at  times,  partial  to  crude  mon- 
sters, but  your  work  was  a  curious  contradiction. 
Why  do  they  hate  you  ?" 

"Hatred  is,  of  course,  fear — fear  wildly  attempt- 
ing to  justify  its  presence.  With  most  people 
this  fear  skulks  within  a  harmless  parade  of 
adjectives,  while  others  are  compelled  to  fall  back 
upon  their  hands.  And  so  people  commit  actual 
murders  while  others  slay  their  opponents  in  con- 
versation. The  former  is  apt  to  be  a  little  more 
convincing  than  the  latter,  though." 

Carl  spoke  slowly,  still  correcting  the  turbu- 
lence of  his  mind  with  a  plausible  display  of 

164 


BLACKGUARD 

words,  and  almost  unconscious  of  what  he  was 
saying. 

"You've  left  out  a  hatred  for  hypocrisy,"  said 
Olga,  with  the  same  abstracted  indifference  to 
words  and  the  same  instinctive  cunning  at  piecing 
them  together.  "Some  of  the  people  who  have 
been  flaying  you  alive  walked  up  to  you  to-night 
with  outstretched  hands  and  congratulations.  And 
I  felt  the  emotion  of  one  too  tired  to  have  more 
than  a  twinge  of  disgust." 

"It  requires  no  effort  to  be  stoical  to  this  joke," 
said  Carl,  "The  masks  are  too  exquisitely  futile 
to  become  interesting  unless,  indeed,  they  attain 
a  moment  of  dextrous  humor." 

Jenesco  and  Murovitch,  who  had  been  disputing 
in  a  corner  of  the  studio,  walked  over  and  offered 
a  belated  introduction. 

"Sorry  to  interrupt  love  scene,  but  maybe  you 
do  not  know  names  of  each  other,"  said  Murovitch 
in  his  deliberate,  shattered  English.  "Names  tell 
people  how  much  like  nothing  they  are.  But 
maybe  both  of  you  want  to  be  somebody,  in  which 
case  it  is  wise  to  pity  you." 

"You  have  a  crudely  spontaneous  imagination 
— it  spies  love  scenes  and  vacuums  with  a  truly 
lumbering  swiftness,"  said  Carl,  annoyed  at  the 
interruption. 

165 


BLACKGUARD 

Murovitch  laughed — he  had  made  a  rehgion  of 
giving  and  receiving  heavy  blows  and  it  made  an 
excellent  screen  for  his  inner  timidities. 

"I  like  your  frankness.  It  reminds  me  of  a 
heavy  negro.    It's  black  and  excited,"  said  Olga. 

"Felman's  complexion  is  a  little  dirty  itself," 
said  Murovitch,  defiling  his  saint-like  face  with 
a  prearranged  grin. 

As  Carl  and  Olga  walked  to  the  studio  where 
she  was  living  with  a  woman  friend,  she  told  him 
some  of  the  immediate  facts  of  her  life,  as  though 
clearing  away  an  opaquely  intruding  rubbish. 

"I'm  working  now  as  a  waitress  in  a  little  cafe- 
teria on  Winthrop  street.  Eight  in  the  morning 
to  three  in  the  afternoon.  Two  afternoons  a  week 
off.  These  burns  on  my  hands  come  from  the 
hot  coffee.  On  the  two  afternoons  I  write  poetry. 
My  body,  you  see,  passes  into  a  less  visible  con- 
duct, and  thoughts  rattle  more  effectively  than 
china  cups.  Then,  on  the  next  morning,  I  am 
forced  to  recollect  that  life  is  in  a  continual 
conspiracy  to  prevent  this  transformation  of 
manners.  The  plates  are  once  more  held  up. 
Beans  and  roast  beef  refuse  to  betray  the  secret." 

They  had  reached  the  studio  and  were  seated 
opposite  to  each  other. 

i66 


BLACKGUARD 

"And  I  work  every  morning  in  a  tobacco  shop," 
said  Carl.  "Since  life  works  with  ravishing  incon- 
gruities, everything  there  should  be  burned  except 
the  cigars.  Meditating  on  this,  I  am  able  to 
wait  more  peacefully  on  the  customers.  Cringing 
sounds  slip  from  my  lips.  'Yes,  MacLane  will 
win  the  next  fight  and  the  weather  is  terrible.' 
Strange,  twisted  little  payments  of  sound.  Life 
clinks  them  in  his  empty  purse." 

"Be  romantic — make  it  the  brave  bow  to  an 
indelicate  dream,"  said  Olga. 

"A  background  of  colored  compensations? 
They,  too,  are  endurable  if  you  don't  turn  your 
head  too  often." 

The  adventure  of  stealing  from  a  cautious  world 
to  an  alcove  of  unguarded  expression  changed 
their  physical  desires  into  brightly  unheeded 
guests  lurking  just  outside  of  their  longing  to 
talk  to  each  other.  When  their  hands  touched  at 
last,  they  laughed  at  the  minute  surprise  tendered 
by  their  flesh.  They  became  two  secret  isolations 
examining  a  velvet  hallucination  of  fusion.  Their 
bodies  touched  while  investigating  this  enticing 
dream. 


167 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XV. 

The  winter  bickered  with  spring;  days  gave 
their  imaginary  separation  of  time;  Olga  and 
Carl  stooped  to  the  task  of  conjuring  myriads 
of  fancifully  plausible  tongues  from  their  dream 
of  perished  identities  lost  in  one  search.  Then 
Olga  left  with  a  theater  company  that  was  about 
to  tour  the  middle  west,  having  managed  to 
secure  the  small  part  of  a  garrulous  chambermaid, 
and  Carl  glided  into  a  riot  of  writing,  waiting  for 
the  telegram  that  would  send  him  to  join  her  in 
a  far  western  city  where  her  company  would 
stage  its  last  performances.  In  the  meantime, 
he  resolved  to  visit  a  wealthy  uncle  who  lived  in 
the  south  and  wanted  to  see  this  "queer  nephew 
of  mine,  who  scribbles  poetry  and  doesn't  care 
about  making  money." 

As  he  sat  one  morning  in  an  elevated  railroad 
coach,  with  valises  at  his  side,  commencing  the 
journey  to  the  city  in  which  his  uncle  lived,  his 
mood  was  glittering  and  aimless.  He  danced  with 
outlines  of  Olga's  words ;  hummed  briskly  saccha- 
rine tunes ;  and  trifled  with  the  contours  of  people 

i68 


BLACKGUARD 

seated  near  him.  Across  the  aisle  a  fatly  rosy 
man  was  reading  a  newspaper  and  Carl's  gaze 
idly  struck  the  front  page  and  absorbed  the  head- 
lines.    In  a  corner  of  the  page  he  came  to  the 

words:    "Actress  Dies  in  M ." 

His  intuition,  springing  from  that  complaint 
vaguely  known  as  metaphysical,  changed  his  skin 
to  a  subtle  frost  and  laid  its  squeezing  pressure 
upon  his  eyes.  The  quick  and  heavy  beat  of  his 
heart  became  frantically  audible  to  his  ears,  like 
a  gauntly  terrifying  horseman  riding  over  him, 
and  his  mind  changed  to  a  loud  confusion.  He 
jumped  across  the  aisle,  tore  the  paper  from  the 
gaping  man,  and  read  that  the  woman  whom 
he  loved  had  instantly  died  after  an  accident. 
Assailed  by  an  oblique  rain  of  black  claws,  he 
tottered  from  the  car,  leaving  his  valises  in  the 
aisle.  The  black  claws  vanished;  his  heart  and 
mind  became  extinct;  and  nothing  remained  save 
a  body  turned  to  ice  and  guided  by  instinct. 
Slowly,  and  with  a  brittle  indecision  in  each  step, 
he  walked  through  the  bickering  brightness  of  one 
street  after  another,  hearing  and  seeing  nothing. 
He  reached  the  bold  flatness  of  the  stone  apart- 
ment building;  read  the  delayed  telegram  held 
out  by  his  mother,  with  the  barest  shiver  of 
returning  life,  and  dropped  upon  his  bed. 

169 


BLACKGUARD 

Sunlight  stood  within  the  small  room,  like  an 
emaciated  patriarch  entering  through  grey  shades. 
Sunlight  ignored  the  glossy  chastities  of  furniture 
and  dull  yellow  walls,  and  looked  intently  at  the 
bed  standing  in  one  corner  of  the  room.  A  long 
human  collapse  in  black  clothes  stuck  to  the  white 
bedspread.  A  blotch  of  blonde  hair  rested  stilly 
in  the  weak  light  and  hinted  of  a  face.  The  body 
shook  now  and  then  as  though  an  inquisitively 
alien  hand  were  investigating  its  lifelessness. 
Then  sobs  pushed  their  way  from  the  hidden  face 
— an  irregular  orgy  of  distorted  lyricism.  It  was 
as  though  a  martyr  were  licking  up  the  blood 
on  his  wounds  and  spitting  it  out  in  long  gurgles 
of  lunatic  delight.  The  sobs  were  separated  by 
rattling  pauses  that  reminded  one  of  a  still  living 
skeleton  endlessly  wrestling  with  death.  The 
skeleton  and  the  martyr  sometimes  felicitated  each 
other  upon  their  endurance,  and  short  silences, 
like  uneasy  lies,  glided  from  the  hidden  face. 
Then  the  bleeding  turmoil  once  more  streamed 
upon  the  air  of  the  room,  almost  extinguishing 
the  dim  sunlight. 

A  peculiar  species  of  happiness  lurked  beneath 
the  weeping.  Grief,  hating  itself,  found  a  revenge- 
ful pleasure  in  attempting  to  tear  and  exhaust 

170 


BLACKGUARD 

itself  into  death.  Sometimes  the  turmoil  sub- 
sided to  a  light  and  sibilant  fight  for  breath. 
The  animal  noise  departed  then  and  a  small  soul, 
much  lighter  than  a  phantom  sin,  plucked  unavail- 
ingly  at  the  mysterious  spear  that  had  suddenly 
coerced  its  breast.  .  .  .  The  dark  words  of 
twilight  finally  entered  the  room,  making  an 
opera  of  the  marred  lyricism  that  esca'ped  from 
the  hidden  face  on  the  bed.  Then  night  pardoned 
the  deficiencies  of  the  room  and  corrected  them 
with  moonlight,  creating  a  tragic  and  chaste 
boudoir.  Carl  Felman  felt  emptied  of  all  sound, 
and  a  mad  craving  for  motion  stabbed  his  limbs. 
He  wanted  to  rush  endlessly  into  space,  barely 
supported  by  the  breathless  consolation  of  run- 
ning after  something  that  could  never  be  caught. 
This  would  also  be  of  great  value  to  his  heart, 
which  was  a  stiffly  smirking  acrobat  who  has 
broken  his  legs  but  still  strives  to  continue  the 
act. 

He  leaped  from  the  bed  and  seized  his  cap. 
His  mother,  who  had  been  entering  his  room  at 
intervals  and  vainly  questioning  him,  stopped  him 
at  the  outer  doorway. 

"Carl,  where  are  you  going?"  she  cried,  in  a 
sharply  fearful  voice. 

171 


BLACKGUARD 

With  a  hugely  mechanical  effort  he  managed 
to  twist  low  sounds  from  his  useless  lips. 

"Just — for  a — walk — back — soon." 

Without  heeding  her  protests  and  questions,  he 
fled  down  to  the  street.  Human  beings  had  disap- 
peared, but  he  could  see  faces  indented  on  the 
fronts  of  houses.  One  had  a  look  of  mangled 
suffering;  another  was  studiously  wicked,  like  a 
learned  burglar;  and  a  third  bore  the  pathetic 
leer  of  a  venturesome  housemaid.  He  picked  up 
these  details,  glanced  at  them  a  moment,  and  then 
threw  them  aside  as  though  they  were  scandals 
from  another  planet.  He  passed  into  a  region  of 
three-story  rooming-houses — flat  wretches  holding 
an  air  of  patient  cowardice.  People  surreptitiously 
filtered  from  the  houses  and  walked  down  the 
street  with  Carl — chorus  girls  with  plump,  sneaky 
faces,  underworld  hoodlums  with  an  air  of  wanly 
etched  bravado,  ponderously  rollicking  servant 
girls,  clerks  with  the  faces  of  genial  mice,  and 
meekly  dazed  old  men  stumping  to  their  dish- 
washing jobs.  To  Carl  they  were  also  hurrying 
after  something  that  had  vanished  and  cajoling 
their  mingled  emptiness  and  pain  with  swift 
motion.  Now  and  then  he  waved  an  arm  to  them 
in  greeting,  while  an  unearthly  smile  dug  into 

172 


BLACKGUARD 

his  face.  His  gesture,  when  observed,  was  taken 
for  an  intended  blow  and  he  left  attitudes  of  fear 
and  pugnacity  behind  him. 

He  crossed  a  bridge  above  a  narrowly  turbid 
river.  The  oily  lights  and  toiling  tug-boats  were 
to  him  an  inexplicable  affront.  Their  stillness  and 
slow  motion  insulted  his  passion  for  speed  and 
with  the  spite  of  a  child  he  looked  down  at  his 
feet  for  a  stone  to  throw  at  them.  Finding  a 
pavement  block,  he  cast  it  into  the  river  and 
rushed  along,  feeling  for  a  second  an  exquisite 
relief.  He  passed  into  a  crowded  theater  and 
business  section.  The  strained  melee  of  lights  and 
noises  became  an  intensely  sympathetic  audience, 
urging  on  his  race,  and  the  faces  and  forms  of 
human  beings  met  in  an  applauding  confusion. 
With  the  cunning  of  a  blind  animal,  he  darted 
through  their  ranks  and  avoided  collisions. 
Finally  he  reached  another  apartment-house 
region — large  brick  boxes  without  a  vestige  of 
expression.  "The  faces  are  gone!"  he  cried,  with 
a  gasping  incredulity,  as  though  inanimate  things 
had  alone  become  real  to  him.  Moonlight,  unable 
to  fathom  their  petty  baldness,  clung  to  them 
with  an  attitude  of  limpid  disgust.  Thickly  con- 
tented families,  mild  and  tightly  garnished,  issued 

173 


BLACKGUARD 

from  the  doorways,  trundling  to  some  moving- 
picture  show  or  ice-cream  palace.  An  aspect  of 
well-washed  and  hollow  serenity  protested  against 
Carl's  direct  flight.  Wrapped  by  this  time  in  a 
warmly  merciful  daze,  he  did  not  detect  the  drably 
swaying  counterfeit  of  happiness  that  would  have 
awakened  within  him  a  maniacal  response. 

He  sped  down  street  after  street  like  an 
inhuman  hunter,  and  came  to  rows  of  wooden 
houses  separated  by  large  fields  and  blackguarded 
by  the  smoke  of  nearby  factories  and  mills.  An 
attitude  of  mildewed  supplication — a  beggar  rising 
from  ferns  and  mud — lifted  itself  over  the  scene. 
Rushing  along,  he  plunged  into  the  open  country, 
where  wild  flowers,  ditches,  and  fields  of  corn 
pungently  conversed  with  moonlight  in  a  language 
too  simple  and  formless  for  human  ears  to  catch. 
But  Carl's  ears  had  become  inhuman,  and  he 
started  a  loud  talk  with  the  growing  objects 
around  him,  revelling  in  their  sympathy  and 
advice.  By  this  time  his  long,  half -running  walk 
had  weakened  him  and  he  began  to  lurch  over 
the  soft  earth  of  the  road  like  a  crushed  and 
fantastic  drunkard. 

The  ingenuous  brilliance  of  a  cloudless  morning 
174 


BLACKGUARD 

stood  hugely  over  the  green  fields  and  yellowish 
brown  roads  and  an  air  of  alert  innocence  went 
exploring  between  the  flowers  and  ditches.  Har- 
riet Radler  walked  slowly  down  the  country  road 
on  her  way  to  the  schoolhouse  where  she  ruled 
a  little  band  of  demons,  drudges,  minor  poets,  and 
clowns.  She  lingered  along  the  roadside,  some- 
times stooping  to  tear  a  tiger  lily  from  the  shallow 
ditch.  Slender  and  short,  a  pliant  virginity  twined 
itself  around  her  body.  Her  young  face,  pink  and 
barely  whipped,  had  been  marked  by  a  tentative 
sorrow  and  was  hungering  for  the  actual  battle. 
Her  black  and  white  clothes  lazily  flirted  with 
imps  of  morning  air  and  were  encouraged  by  her 
eyes. 

Looking  down  at  the  ditch,  she  saw  the  half- 
concealed  form  of  a  man  lying  in  the  water,  with 
his  head  and  arms  resting  upon  the  bank.  A  trag- 
edy of  dry  mud  stamped  its  grey  mosaic  over  his 
face.  His  blonde  hair  drooped  with  dirt  like  a 
trampled  sunflower.  The  Pierrot-like  hesitation  of 
his  features  peeped  beneath  the  dirt — a  still  and 
frightened  ritual.  With  the  horror  of  one  who 
believes  that  she  is  beholding  a  dead  man,  Harriet 
knelt  beside  the  figure  and  shook  its  head,  her 
face  turned  away  and  her  eyes  tightly  closed. 

175 


BLACKGUARD 

Then  she  heard  a  mingled  rustle  and  splash  and 
saw  that  the  man  was  rising  to  his  feet.  He  stood 
with  bent  knees  over  the  mud  of  the  ditch,  his 
black  clothes  garlanded  with  slime,  his  face  twitch- 
ing into  life  beneath  its  stiff  mask  of  earth.  With 
a  squeal  of  fright  she  scrambled  to  her  feet  and 
ran  down  the  road.  The  man  in  the  ditch,  Carl 
Felman,  felt  that  something  was  still  evading  him 
and  once  more  experienced  the  hunter's  frenzy 
that  had  tumbled  him  over  the  night.  Gripped  by 
a  superhuman  agility,  he  transcended  his  stiff 
joints  and  pursued  her  down  the  road.  He  caught 
her,  his  hands  dropping  upon  her  shoulders  and 
whirling  her  around.  She  faced  him  with  uplifted 
arms,  a  turbulence  of  fright  and  curiosity  swiftly 
toying  with  her  eyes  and  mouth.  He  lowered  his 
hands  and  stood  limply  before  her. 

"Do  you  know  what  grief  is?"  he  asked,  in  an 
almost  indistinct  voice. 

She  stared  and  did  not  answer. 

"Do  you  know  what  grief  is?"  he  asked,  in  a 
softly  clear  voice. 

A  look  of  loose  wonder  came  to  her  face. 

"Do  you  know  what  grief  is?"  he  asked,  in  an 
almost  loud  voice. 

A  darkly  smiling  contemplation  revised  the  lines 
of  her  face. 

176 


BLACKGUARD 

"Yes,"  she  whispered. 

Without  another  word  they  both  walked  down 
the  country  road  together. 


177 


PART  III 
INSTIGATION 


BLACKGUARD 


Instillation 


CHAPTER    XVI. 


HE  train  in  which  Carl  was  riding 
rolled  slowly  through  the  outskirts 
of  a  southern  city  and  he  looked 
out  at  the  rows  of  negro  cottages 
and  hovels  that  plaintively  cringed 
underneath  the  wide  foliage  of 
willow  and  magnolia  trees.  Most  of  the  cottages 
were  unpainted  and  grey  with  the  impersonally 
chaste  kiss  of  time,  while  the  hovels  were  mere 
flimsy  boxes  covered  with  black  tar  paper.  Sun- 
flowers and  morning  glories  stood  amid  the  weeds 
and  twined  about  the  slanting  fences  like  gaudy 
virgins  dismayed  at  their  sight  of  a  lewdly  dis- 
ordered room  and  appealing  to  the  sunlight  for 
protection.  Negro  women  in  faded  sunbonnets 
and  wrappers  could  sometimes  be  seen  shuffling 
down  the  thickly  dusty  roads  and  negro  children, 
in  weird  incoherences  of  tattered  clothes,  tumbled 
around  the  humble  doorsteps.    The  children  were 


i8i 


BLACKGUARD 

little  black  madmen  unconsciously  dodging  a  huge 
fist  that  was  concealed  beneath  the  scene.  The 
dust  of  a  late  August  morning  had  dropped  upon 
all  things,  sifting  its  listless  sadness  into  everj^ 
crevice  and  crack,  and  even  the  fierce  sun  could 
not  dispel  this  invasion. 

Every  shade  of  this  scene  was  an  accurately 
friendly  answer  to  Carl's  mood  and  he  squandered 
the  brooding  light  of  his  eyes  upon  all  of  the 
visual  details  outside  of  the  train  window.  The 
mask  of  careless  bitterness  upon  his  face  said 
its  hello  to  the  cowering  and  sinister  apathy  of 
the  houses  and  people,  and  viciouslj'  he  longed  to 
leap  out  of  the  window  and  join  the  unashamed 
animal  rites  w^hich  these  hovels  and  human  beings 
were  parading.  Here  an  alien  race  was  standing 
amid  clouds  of  evil-smelling  squalor  and  staring  at 
its  broken  longings  and  dreams — staring  \\'ith  a 
wild  hopelessness.  This  race  had  lost  its  own  civil- 
ization and  was  clumsilj'  imitating  that  of  the 
white  man,  not  because  of  any  innate  desire,  but 
because  it  had  been  forced  to  blend  into  its  sur- 
roundings or  perish,  and  Carl  felt  that  all  of  his 
life  had  also  been  an  animated  lie  of  flesh  and 
speech,  devised  to  aid  him  in  escaping  from  the 
contemptuous  eyes  that  vastly  hemmed  him  in. 

182 


BLACKGUARD 

And  now,  with  the  feelings  of  a  man  who  had 
neatly  murdered  himself,  he  was  planning  to  turn 
the  knives  of  his  thoughts  and  emotions  upon 
other  people,  not  for  revenge,  but  because  the 
marred  ghost  of  himself  harshly  desired  to  con- 
vince itself  that  it  was  still  alive.  If  this  ghost 
had  yielded  to  the  subterfuges  of  kindness  and 
gentleness  it  would  have  become  too  much  aware 
of  its  own  thin  remoteness  from  life,  and  cruelty 
alone  could  induce  it  to  believe  that  it  was  still 
welded  to  the  actualities  of  existence. 

As  Carl  sat  at  the  window  he  could  often  hear 
the  grotesquely  quavering,  boldly  mellow  laughter 
of  negro  men  trudging  to  their  work,  but  these 
sounds  did  not  express  humor  to  him.  They  held 
the  strong  effort  of  men  to  flee  from  tormenting 
longings  and  the  numbly  vicious  rebuke  of  pov- 
erty, and  the  sounds  which  these  men  released 
merely  symbolized  the  long  strides  of  their  fancied 
escape.  Laughter  can  be  merely  the  explosive 
sound  with  which  human  beings  seek  to  demolish 
each  other — the  indirect  weapon  of  self-hatred. 
Carl  laughed  with  a  strained  loudness,  throwing 
a  magnified  echo  to  the  negroes  on  the  dusty  roads 
outside,  and  a  drowsily  plump,  middle-aged  woman 
in  an  opposite  seat  opened  her  mouth  widely  and 

183 


BLACKGUARD 

huddled  into  a  corner,  fearing  that  she  might  be 
attacked  by  a  maniac.  He  gave  her  a  glance  and 
feasted  upon  her  fear,  for  her  shrinking  attitude 
was  falsely  and  deliciously  persuading  the  ghost 
of  himself  that  it  still  held  a  potency  over  other 
people. 

Sometimes  a  song  crazily  drifted  to  Carl's  ears 
from  one  of  the  negro  cottages — a  song  that  was 
weighted  with  loosely  undulating  sadness — and  he 
listened  with  a  stern  greediness.  Music  is  a  huge, 
treacherous  sound  made  by  thoughts  and  emotions 
to  console  them  for  their  feeling  of  minute  mor- 
tality, and  after  it  has  given  them  its  dream  of 
permanent  size  it  disappears,  slaying  the  illusion 
with  silence.  Now  it  brought  a  delusion  of  sub- 
stantiality to  the  ghost  within  the  mould  of  Carl's 
flesh  and  he  listened  in  a  trance  of  gratitude.  Lost 
in  the  obliterations  of  his  grief,  he  felt  infinitely 
nearer  to  these  abject,  musical  negroes  outside 
than  to  the  artificially  silent,  stiffly  satisfied  white 
people  with  whom  he  was  riding.  Grief,  which 
is  an  insane  tyrant  among  emotions,  has  an  effort- 
less way  of  crossing  all  boundaries  and  walls,  but 
it  does  not  reveal  any  hidden  oneness  between 
human  beings.  Grief  places  men  and  women  in  a 
vacuum  of  renunciation,  or  shows  them  that  they 

184 


BLACKGUARD 

have  little  connection  with  the  people  around 
them  and  that  they  have  been  enduring  an  alien 
camp.  Ruled  by  this  latter  discovery,  Carl  looked 
with  an  undisguised  hatred  at  the  formal,  com- 
placent white  people  in  the  railway  coach  and 
felt  that  he  was  deeply  related  to  the  negroes 
outside. 

Almost  three  months  had  passed  since  the  invis- 
ible knife  had  swung  into  the  middle  of  his  being, 
and  since  he  had  staggered  across  the  agitated 
sincerity  of  night  to  the  peaceful  compassion  of 
the  young  school  teacher.  Now  and  then  he 
remembered  their  silent  walk  down  the  sturdy 
brightness  of  the  country  road — a  silence  which 
had  been  a  soft  wreath  ironically  thrown  upon 
the  weakness  of  words — and  the  troubled  way  in 
which  she  had  helped  him  brush  his  clothes  and 
wash  his  face,  and  the  stumbling  simplicity  of 
the  words  with  which  she  had  tried  to  comfort 
him.  Although  he  had  been  a  stranger  to  her,  she 
had  thrown  aside  that  distrust  which  is  born  of 
sensual  pride  and  a  cheaply  purchased  worldly 
wisdom,  influenced  by  the  helpless  directness  of 
his  demeanor  and  by  the  supple  humility  which  a 
grief  of  her  own  had  once  left  within  her.  The 
force  of  her  fearlessness  had  fallen  upon  him  like 

185 


BLACKGUARD 

the  sweeping  touch  of  another  world,  and  in  his 
daze  he  had  actually  believed  that  she  had  been 
sent  by  the  woman  whom  he  had  lost  as  an  alert 
messenger  striving  to  teach  him  how  to  hold  his 
ghostlike  shoulders  up  beneath  a  future  burden. 
If  she  had  held  a  human  aspect  to  him  he  would 
have  hated  and  reviled  her,  for  then  she  would 
have  been  merely  an  atom  in  the  vast,  turbid 
reality  that  had  slowly  lured  him  to  an  imbecilic 
torture.  He  accepted  the  curves  of  her  body  as 
an  unearthly  visitation  and  possessed  them  as  one 
who  passes  through  a  fragile  ritual.  But  after 
his  departure  from  her,  as  he  once  more  walked 
down  the  shaggy,  solid  country  road,  she  had 
tiptoed  away  from  him  with  a  spectral  quickness, 
and  the  clamor  of  a  world  had  once  more  attacked 
him,  like  the  scattered  falsehoods  of  an  idiot. 
The  rustle  of  trees  had  become  an  insignificant 
whisper  of  defeat ;  the  songs  of  birds  had  changed 
to  the  shrill  vacuities  with  which  a  monster  enter- 
tained himself;  the  colored  groups  of  flowers  had 
become  the  pitiful  remains  of  a  violated  carnival; 
the  earth  beneath  his  feet  had  altered  to  the  stolid 
aloofness  of  a  giant  moron;  and  the  sunlight  had 
seemed  to  be  a  theatrical  accident. 

When  he  had  reached  the  city,  with  its  orderly 

i86 


BLACKGUARD 

ranks  of  houses  and  factories  and  its  dully  precise 
pavements,  the  scene  had  been  to  him  a  cunning 
mirage  made  by  dying  people  to  suppress  their 
realization  of  the  advancing  destruction.  The 
people  on  the  streets  had  held  the  complicated 
glee  and  perplexity  of  an  insane  slave  trying  to 
extract  an  imaginary  importance  from  his  bond- 
age. He  had  longed  to  jump  at  their  throats 
and  silence  the  feverish  lie  that  was  reviling  the 
truthful  stare  of  his  eyes  and  only  his  physical 
exhaustion  had  prevented  him  from  doing  this. 
Grief  is  a  spontaneous  welcome  sent  to  the  insan- 
ity that  lurks  within  all  human  beings,  and  its 
invitation  greets  a  responsive  strength  or  a  fright- 
ened weakness  of  imagination,  according  to  the 
man  or  woman  who  receives  it. 

And  so  he  had  plodded  back  to  his  home, 
carrying  within  him  a  numb  confusion  that  was 
sometimes  disrupted  by  vicious  impulses,  and 
forcing  the  ghost  of  himself  into  a  motion  which 
it  could  not  understand.  He  had  tried  to  answer 
the  angry  and  uneasy  questions  of  his  parents 
with  plausible  lies  at  his  own  expense.  Yes,  he 
had  met  someone  who  had  given  him  bad  news 
and  in  a  fit  of  temper  he  had  rushed  from  the 
railroad  station  and  deserted  his  valises.    What 

187 


BLACKGUARD 

was  in  the  telegram?  Oh,  just  a  message  from 
a  friend.  Where  had  he  been  for  the  past  two 
days  ?  Why,  he  had  gone  on  a  spree  and  had  slept 
off  his  drunkenness  at  the  house  of  a  friend. 
Shouldn't  he  be  locked  in  an  insane  asylum  ?  Yes, 
but  life  had  already  granted  him  that  favor.  With 
a  glib  tongue  he  tried  to  serenade  the  barren 
comedy  of  improbabilities  to  which  he  had 
returned,  but  he  scarcely  heard  the  words  that 
he  was  uttering,  and  as  he  wrung  them  from  the 
empty  ghost  that  was  within  him  he  longed  to 
strike  his  parents  in  the  face  and  feed  greedily 
upon  their  rage  and  astonishment,  in  an  effort 
to  convince  himself  that  he  was  still  substantially 
powerful,  still  able  to  assert  his  reality  by  injuring 
the  people  around  him.  With  an  act  of  this  kind 
he  could  destroy  the  indifferent  fantasy  of  life 
and  change  it  to  a  tangible  and  active  opponent. 
The  man  standing  before  him — his  father — was 
merely  an  irritating  puppet  whose  lack  of  under- 
standing moved  jerkily,  governed  by  the  hands 
of  an  ignorant  dream. 

With  a  cry  of  hatred,  Carl  struck  his  father 
in  the  face  and  watched  him  reel  back  against 
the  wall  of  the  dining-room  with  a  feeling  of  warm 
triumph.     He  struck  him  again  and  revelled  in 

i88 


BLACKGUARD 

the  blood  that  decorated  the  man's  lips.  His 
mother  shrieked  with  fear;  his  father  returned 
the  blows;  and  the  two  men  fought  around  the 
room,  overturning  chairs  and  vases.  Several 
neighbors,  brought  by  the  cries  of  his  mother, 
rushed  in  and  overpowered  him.  Together  with 
his  father,  they  held  him  down  while  someone 
summoned  a  patrol  wagon,  and  he  was  taken  to 
a  cell  in  a  police  station.  As  he  sat  in  the  flatly 
smelling  semi-gloom  of  the  cell  he  caressed,  with 
an  overpowering  fondness,  the  blood  that  had 
stiffened  upon  parts  of  his  face,  for  it  mutely 
testified  that  he  had  conquered  the  remote  lie 
around  him  and  altered  it  to  a  satisfying  enemy. 
He  had  persuaded  himself  that  he  was  still  alive, 
and  the  blows  which  he  had  given  his  father  had 
been  the  first  proof  of  this  illusory  emancipation. 
Throughout  the  night,  as  he  shifted  upon  the  iron 
shelf  that  was  his  bed,  he  muttered  to  himself 
at  regular  intervals,  "I  am  alive,  I  am  still  alive," 
as  though  he  were  trying  to  preserve  a  triumphant 
dream  that  would  soon  disappear,  and  the  grief 
within  him  rocked  to  and  fro  upon  the  words, 
using  them  as  a  cradle. 

But  when  the  morning  dodged  shamefacedly 
into  his  cell,  bringing  with  it  a  faint  retinue  of 

189 


BLACKGUARD 

city  sounds,  the  annoying  fantasy  returned  with 
full  vigor,  and  the  ghost  within  him  stealthily 
assumed  possession  of  his  flesh.  Once  more  he 
was  a  thinly  wounded  spectator,  filled  with  an 
impotent  hatred  at  the  melee  about  him  and 
longing  for  the  lusty  release  of  physical  motion. 
Two  small  boys,  lying  upon  their  stomachs,  peered 
through  the  grating  of  his  cell  window,  which 
stood  on  a  level  with  the  sidewalk  outside,  and 
jibed  at  him.  He  cursed  them  incessantly,  with 
an  anger  that  was  not  directed  at  them,  but  at 
the  meaningless  tensions  of  their  voices,  and  with 
the  tumult  of  his  own  voice  he  vainly  strove  to 
shake  the  wraith  within  him  to  firmer  outlines. 

As  he  stood  before  the  magistrate  a  few  hours 
later,  an  incredulous  sneer  was  on  his  face,  as 
though  the  man  at  the  desk  above  him  were  a 
pompous,  talkative  scarecrow,  and  with  a  stubborn 
silence  he  confronted  the  questions  that  were 
thrown  at  him.  In  a  low,  hesitating  voice  his 
father  declared  that  he  feared  that  his  son  had 
become  insane,  and  the  judge  ordered  an  exami- 
nation by  one  of  the  city  physicians.  Carl  was 
returned  to  his  cell,  after  his  parents  had  pelted 
him  with  half-angry  and  half-bewildered  sentences 
in  an  ante-room  of  the  court,  and  as  he  sat  again 

190 


BLACKGUARD 

in  his  cell,  surveying  the  rigid  jeer  of  the  iron 
bars,  his  hatred  began  to  listen  to  the  advice 
of  cunning — a  cunning  pilfered  from  the  wilted 
depths  of  his  despair.  He  began  to  see  that 
physical  blows  and  silence  were  crude  and  inef- 
fective weapons  in  his  attack  upon  the  insulting 
commotion  of  life  and  that,  if  he  desired  to  injure 
human  beings  so  that  both  he  and  they  might 
become  real  for  a  moment,  he  must  use  more 
indirect  and  ingenious  methods. 

When  the  city  physician,  a  tall,  briskly-balanced 
man  with  no  imagination,  questioned  him  in  his 
cell,  he  became  a  blandly  appealing  and  submissive 
actor. 

"Yes,  doctor,  I  had  a  nervous  breakdown  from 
overstudy,  you  know,  and  for  a  time  I'm  afraid 
that  I  lost  my  reason.  They  tell  me  that  I  struck 
my  father  and  this  has  horrified  me,  as  I  haven't 
the  slightest  recollection  of  what  I  did.  But  I've 
gathered  myself  together  now  and  I  can  promise 
you  that  I'll  never  lose  control  of  myself  again — 
never!  And  I'm  awfully  sorry  for  what  I  did.  I 
can  assure  you  of  the  sincerity  of  my  repentance." 

The  physician  was  putty  in  Carl's  adroit  hands 
— this  composed  young  man  with  an  intelligent, 

191 


BLACKGUARD 

contrite  speech  must,  of  course,  be  quite  sane. 
Carl,  as  he  spoke  to  this  man,  slowly  formed  an 
evil  grin  beneath  the  cool  mask  of  his  face,  and 
he  relished  the  task  of  showering  upon  this  man 
earnest  platitudes,  smooth  imitations  of  that  lim- 
ited sleep  known  as  "common  sense,"  and  words 
of  self-reproach,  because  this  trickery  brought 
back  to  him  his  old  sense  of  power  over  his  sur- 
roundings and  offered  a  subtle  outlet  for  his  hatred 
of  life.  The  physician  ended  by  shaking  his  hand 
with  a  genial  respect  and  when  evening  came  he 
was  given  his  freedom. 

He  returned  to  his  home,  repeating  the  soft 
treachery  of  his  words  while  his  fists  still  longed 
to  lunge  out  at  the  faces  in  front  of  him,  but  the 
shrewdness  of  a  ghost  determined  to  regain  a 
semblance  of  life  by  cleverly  deceiving  and  pun- 
ishing the  people  around  it  came  to  his  rescue 
and  controlled  his  body.  His  parents  had  felt 
wrathful  at  the  presence  of  something  which  they 
could  only  dimly  see  and  which  he  made  no  effort 
to  clarify,  but  life  had  taught  them  to  make  a 
god  of  submission,  and  a  heavy  tenderness  mingled 
with  an  alert  fear  crept  into  their  posture  toward 
him.  He  trudged  back  to  the  loquacious,  coarse 
emptiness  of  his  clerkship  at  the  tobacco  shop 
and  shunned  the  world  that  he  had  previously 

192 


BLACKGUARD 

inhabited,  for  he  feared  that  if  he  met  anyone 
whom  he  knew  he  would  feel  again  the  irresistible 
inclination  to  interrogate  their  throats,  and  he 
knew  that  these  impulses  would  only  lead  to  his 
own  destruction.  When  he  accidentally  met  some 
acquaintance  on  the  street,  he  would  hurry  on 
like  a  nervous  criminal,  ignoring  the  other's 
greetings. 

He  prowled  about  the  city,  still  in  search  of  a 
violent  dream  that  could  offer  its  delusion  of 
reckless  strength  to  the  mutilated  spirit  whose 
complaints  drove  him  on.  He  ran  to  the  soiled 
raptures  of  prostitutes  and  sensually  oppressed, 
adventurous  girls  who  could  be  picked  up  on  the 
streets,  and  gave  them  a  twisted  symphony  of 
blows,  curses,  whispered  insinuations,  lies,  while 
he  revelled  in  the  illusion  of  cruelty  that  was 
lending  a  false  reality  to  the  thin  futilities  of 
his  mind  and  flesh.  With  a  mixture  of  brutality 
and  delicately  simulated  caresses,  he  overawed 
these  women  and  they  felt  themselves  in  the 
presence  of  a  charming,  abstracted  fiend,  whose 
kaleidoscopic  insincerity  only  made  them  long  to 
change  it  to  a  gesture  of  actual  love.  He  sought 
the  company  of  thieves  and  hoodlums,  and  at  first 
they  distrusted  him  because  his  restrained  man- 

193 


BLACKGUARD 

ners  and  gently  removed  look  were  not  proper 
credentials,  but  when  they  saw  how  eager  he  was 
for  the  impact  of  fists,  and  how  he  could  take  a 
blow  and  rise  with  a  grin  of  stunned  delight,  they 
accepted  him  as  an  eccentric  brother.  They  did 
not  know  that  these  actions  were  not  born  of 
courage,  but  were  caused  by  a  gigantic  longing 
for  physical  pain — pain  that  could  shock  his  numb 
spirit  into  a  feeling  of  sharply  hideous  communion 
with  an  actual  world. 

But  finally  this  life  began  to  weary  him  because 
it  could  not  reach  the  flimsy  loneliness  that  stood 
within  him.  He  carried  within  him  at  all  times 
an  audience  of  ghostly  thoughts  and  emotions, 
and  they  were  at  last  becoming  bored  with  the 
stolen  melodrama.  He  determined  to  practice  an 
economy  in  movements  and  words,  and  he  walked 
alone  at  night  and  on  streets  where  the  possibility 
of  meeting  someone  who  knew  him  would  be 
distant.  He  watched  the  syncopated  gliding  of 
people  with  the  irritation  of  a  stranger.  The  men 
and  women  who  drifted  or  bobbed  along  were 
cardboard  mannikins  to  him  and  he  vainly  tried 
to  give  life  to  their  flatness  and  lack  of  color. 
Sometimes  he  would  pause  and  touch  his  arm  and 
face,  wondering  at  the  odd  inadequateness  of  their 

194 


BLACKGUARD 

presence.  Olga  had  become  a  living  but  invisible 
being  who  was  constantly  groping  for  him,  with 
eyes  unused  to  the  outlines  of  earth,  and  some- 
times finding  his  shoulder  in  a  fleeting  and 
accidental  way.  When  this  happened,  he  would 
turn  around  abruptly  and  berate  his  inability  to 
extract  her  form  from  the  concealing  air.  At  such 
times  he  would  often  speak  to  her.  "Olga  .  .  . 
Olga  .  .  .  what  is  this  unsought  blindness  that  has 
come  to  both  of  us?"  he  would  cry  into  the  night 
air  of  a  street.  "A  cruel  chicanery  ...  a  blurred 
and  simple  pause  ...  a  little  fantasy  within  a  huge 
one?  Am  I  a  coward  rolling  in  the  mud  that 
stretches  before  a  vast  gate?  Life  seems  a  fan- 
tastic conspiracy,  panting  and  rattling  in  its 
efforts  to  hide  the  emptiness  beneath  it  .  .  . 
Olga  .  .  .  take  me  to  your  burnished  hermitage 
...  I  am  tired." 

He  would  walk  on,  trying  to  imagine  what  her 
answer  had  been,  and  winning  an  elusive  and 
deliberately  wrought  consolation  that  stayed  for 
an  hour  and  then  gradually  departed.  His  life 
had  settled  into  the  recurrence  of  these  reactions, 
when  a  second  invitation  arrived  from  his  wealthy 
uncle  in  the  southern  city,  and  he  had  accepted 
merely  because  he  wanted  a  new  arena  for  his 

195 


BLACKGUARD 

struggle  with  a  discredited  reality — fresher  tar- 
gets and  a  change  in  the  illusion's  surface. 

And  now  he  was  seated  in  the  train  that  slowly- 
rolled  through  the  outskirts  of  a  southern  city 
and  giving  his  eyes  to  the  squalid  negro  section 
that  unfurled  before  him.    .   .   . 


196 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XVII. 

He  turned  from  the  window  and  strove  to  place 
an  expression  of  close-lipped  serenity  on  his  face, 
for  the  train  had  almost  reached  the  station.  He 
had  not  seen  his  uncle  for  years  and  he  played 
with  dim  memories  of  the  man's  appearance. 
When  he  walked  down  the  station  platform  he 
found  that  his  uncle,  Doctor  Max  Edleman,  was 
waiting  just  outside  of  the  iron  gates.  Doctor 
Edleman  was  a  man  of  sixty  years,  sturdily 
rotund,  with  a  tall  body  that  was  beginning  to 
be  disgraced  by  its  expanding  paunch.  His  head 
was  unusually  large  and  ruled  by  small  blue  eyes 
and  the  sharply  turned  breadth  of  a  nose.  His 
great,  thick  lips  were  tightly  withdrawn  to  an  out- 
line of  benign  patience  and  his  florid  face  ridiculed 
the  trace  of  wrinkles  that  had  flicked  it.  His 
greyish  blonde  hair  was  still  fairly  abundant,  and 
all  of  him  suggested  a  man  who  was  uniquely 
intact  because  he  had  scarcely  ever  allowed  life 
to  clutch  him  familiarly.  Since  he  was  an  Alsatian 
Jew,  he  kissed  Carl  carefully  on  both  cheeks,  and 

197 


BLACKGUARD 

this  annoyed  Carl,  not  from  the  usual  masculine 
reasons,  but  because  he  felt  that  this  was  a  jocose 
insult  from  a  fantasy  that  despised  him,  but  he 
submitted  with  a  flitting  grimace. 

He  took  Carl  to  an  automobile  and  after  they 
had  been  driven  away  he  smothered  him  with 
questions. 

"Your  dear  mother  tells  me  that  you  have  been 
acting  queerly  of  late,"  he  said,  in  the  heavily- 
hieasured  way  of  speaking  he  had.  "You  have 
been  refusing  to  speak  to  anyone  and  staying 
away  from  home — bringing  worry  to  your  dear 
mother.  It  seems  to  me  that  you  have  given 
enough  care  and  trouble  to  your  parents,  and 
that  it's  about  time  that  you  acted  like  a  normal 
man.  I  understand  that  you  have  been  dissipating 
and  going  with  dissolute  people.  You  are  twenty- 
five  now  and  there  is  no  longer  any  excuse  for 
this  wildness.  What  have  you  to  say  for  your- 
self?" 

"Don't  ask  me  to  explain  things  that  you 
couldn't  understand,"  said  Carl,  returning  to  act 
in  the  falsely  unpleasant  play.  "I  have  had  a 
great  grief  and  I'm  trying  in  my  own  way  to 
make  it  a  friend  of  mine.  If  I  tell  you  that  your 
questions  bring  back  wounds,  I  am  sure  that  you 
will  not  desire  to  hurt  me." 

198 


BLACKGUARD 

He  gave  his  uncle  words  that  would  appease 
and  disarm  him,  while  at  the  same  time  evading 
his  queries,  and  this  game  gave  him  a  smooth 
semblance  of  life. 

"So-o,  so-o,  I  have  no  desire  to  penetrate  your 
secrets,"  said  Dr.  Edleman,  in  a  kindly  voice  that 
feebly  strove  to  comprehend.  "I  am  simply  advis- 
ing you  to  pull  yourself  together.  Show  some 
consideration  for  the  people  around  you." 

He  continued  to  offer  the  benevolent  adultera- 
tions of  his  advice,  and  as  Carl  listened  he 
suddenly  thought  of  a  high-school  teacher  who 
had  once  rebuked  him  for  bringing  to  class  a 
theme  entitled  "Women  Who  Walk  the  Streets," 
and  with  a  vaporously  swinging  amusement  in 
his  heart  he  almost  felt  human  again.  This 
fantasy  could  hold  a  blustering  smirk  now  and 
then — its  only  extenuation.  But  the  nearness 
vanished  as  his  uncle's  voice  became  a  swindling 
monotone,  angering  him  with  its  formal  pretense 
of  life.  Carefully,  and  with  a  ghostlike  insincerity 
that  bribed  his  voice  with  lightness,  he  gave 
words  that  could  hold  this  man  at  arm's  length. 
The  strain  of  adapting  his  words  to  the  intelli- 
gence of  the  man  beside  him  brought  him  a  closer 
relation  to  the  bickering  phantasmagoria  of  men 

199 


BLACKGUARD 

and  their  motives  without  in  any  way  summoning 
his  own  thoughts  and  emotions.  Dr.  Edleman 
felt  that  his  nephew  was  skillfully  attempting 
to  defend  a  selfish  past  and  bringing  into  the 
service  of  this  motive  a  graceful  keenness  of 
mind,  but  beyond  this  point  Carl's  words  were 
unable  to  affect  him. 

"I  have  always  admired  your  brilliancy,"  he 
said,  "and  I  only  wish  that  you  would  use  it  in 
the  right  way.  A  young  man  must  pay  some 
attention  to  the  desires  and  opinions  of  older 
people.  It  will  be  a  glad  day  for  me  when  I  see 
that  you  are  using  your  talents  to  bring  happiness 
to  other  people.   A  glad  day." 

Carl  gave  a  sigh  to  the  grave  dullness  that 
marched  forth  in  his  uncle's  voice  and  meditated 
upon  the  curious  differences  in  sound  with  which 
people  petted  their  limitations  and  discretions. 
These  differences  were  known  as  words,  and  when 
they  pleased  a  great  number  of  people  they  were 
hailed  as  symbols  of  genius  or  power,  but  Carl 
could  see  no  distinction  between  any  of  them. 
Like  a  horde  of  tired  servants,  they  pranced  to 
the  prides  and  hatreds  of  men  and  then  returned 
to   their   common   grave,   and   only   their   exact 

200 


BLACKGUARD 

arrangement  gave  them  a  flitting  assumption  of 
life.  "What  is  the  difference  between  this  old 
man  and  myself?  Several  keys  to  false  doors  of 
thought  and  emotion,  misplaced  or  lost  in  his 
youth  and  found  in  mine."  Through  reiterating 
these  plausibilities  he  tried  to  give  bulk  and 
texture  to  the  fantasy  of  existence. 

The  automobile  stopped  before  the  Edleman 
home,  which  was  a  large  two-story  structure — a 
partial  reproduction  of  the  Colonial  period  modi- 
fied to  conform  to  the  more  exuberant  inclinations 
of  an  Alsatian  Jew.  Four  broad,  high  wooden 
pillars,  painted  white,  rose  over  a  wide  veranda 
and  ended  in  a  slanting  roof  of  black  slate,  and 
the  walls  were  of  red  brick  courted  by  an  abund- 
ance of  vines.  A  large  garden,  with  tons  of  fruit 
trees  and  brilliant  episodes  of  flowers,  surrounded 
the  house  and  was  enclosed  by  a  level  hedge  of 
shrubs  and  a  low  iron  fence.  An  impression  of 
dreamlessly  cluttered  luxury,  verging  in  spots 
upon  bland  somnolence,  proclaimed  the  emptjr 
heart  of  the  place,  but  it  was  almost  a  distinct 
flattery  to  Carl,  who  had  grown  tired  of  aggressive 
angles  and  plain  surfaces.  Here,  at  least,  the 
mirage  held  a  sleek  flirtation  with  bunches  of 
color  and  burdened  curves. 

20I 


BLACKGUARD 

His  aunt  Bertha,  a  short,  stout  woman  in  a 
gown  of  brown  taffeta  and  white  lace,  welcomed 
him  in  a  babbling  and  languid  fashion  and  showed 
him  to  his  room.  She  was  a  softly  shallow  woman 
whose  major  interests  were  card  parties  and  the 
lingering  intricacies  of  gossip.  The  flabby  round- 
ness of  her  face  was  in  the  last  grip  of  middle 
age  and  her  mind  was  as  scanty  and  precisely 
glistening  as  the  greyish-brown  hair  that  slanted 
back  from  her  low  forehead.  After  the  dinner, 
she  hurried  off  to  the  mildly  mercenary  rites  of 
a  bridge  whist  party  and  Carl  was  left  to  wander 
idly  around  the  garden.  He  sat  on  the  grass 
beneath  a  persimmon  tree  and  played  with  lazy, 
cruel  thoughts  in  which  he  slapped  a  man's  face 
or  tortured  a  woman's  cheek,  still  moved  by  his 
old  mania  to  profane  the  empty  dream  which 
life  had  become  to  him,  forcing  it  into  a  vigorous 
duplicate  of  reality. 

The  bright  afternoon,  with  its  myriads  of 
shrilly  clear  and  hissing  sounds,  was  like  a 
troubled  falsetto  rapture  and  he  weakly  fought 
to  bring  it  nearer  to  his  senses.  As  he  sat  beneath 
the  tree  he  resolved  to  give  his  mind  some  labor 
with  which  it  could  transform  the  vision  to  a 
more  solid  picture,  and  he  thought  of  the  people 

202 


BLACKGUARD 

who  would  soon  be  embarrassing  him  with  their 
mouths  and  eyes.  They  were  Jews  of  a  kind  that 
had  rapidly  spread  over  the  south.  The  older 
people  among  them  had  migrated  to  the  south 
some  forty  years  previously  and  had  gradually 
won  large  or  comfortable  fortunes  by  means  of 
their  thriftiness  and  trading  abilities.  They  were 
now  contented  grand-  and  great-grand-parents, 
surrounded  by  two  generations  of  their  offspring, 
and  all  of  them  were  strangely  indifferent  to  the 
austere  mysticism  for  which  the  Jewish  race  is  so 
verbosely  noted.  Dreamless,  voluble,  self-assured, 
they  angled  with  their  religion  in  a  half-hearted 
way  and  blackmailed,  with  money,  the  occasional 
flutters  of  mental  curiosity.  They  had  picked  up 
several  mannerisms  of  the  south — softly  drawling 
voices  and  unhurried  movements — and  the  only 
things  that  distinguished  them  as  Jews  were  the 
curved  gusto  of  their  faces  and  the  fact  that  they 
mingled  only  with  each  other — a  last,  lukewarm 
trace  of  loyalty  left  by  the  surge  of  centuries 
of  past  incidents. 

Carl  went  into  the  house  and  returned,  with 
paper  and  pencil,  to  his  station  beneath  the  per- 
simmon tree.  He  strove  to  write  a  poem  to  the 
woman  whom  he  had  lost.    It  was  a  torture  that, 

203 


BLACKGUARD 

like  a  starved  monster,  devoured  the  softer  spaces 
within  his  heart.  It  was  as  though  he  were 
endeavoring  to  compress  the  ruins  of  an  entire 
world,  making  them  narrower  and  narrower,  more 
and  more  alive,  until  at  last  they  formed  the  body 
of  a  woman.  The  effort  brought  him  an  actual 
physical  pain;  drops  of  sweat  were  born  on  his 
forehead,  and  his  spirit  reeled  like  a  mesmerized, 
beaten  drunkard.  "All  of  life  is  a  lie  unless  I 
make  her  appear  on  this  paper,"  he  cried  aloud 
to  the  persimmon-tree  leaves,  for  the  lack  of  better 
gods.  He  detested  his  own  futility  and  sought 
to  avenge  himself  upon  it.  When  the  poem  was 
finished  he  fell  into  a  troubled,  plundered  sleep 
in  which  his  consciousness  busily  made  reports 
that  were  unheeded.  He  could  still  see  the  trees 
and  flowers,  but  they  were  like  the  edge  of  the 
universe  miraculously  brought  near  to  his  eyes. 
Finally,  with  an  effort  like  a  straight  line  thrust- 
ing aside  several  worlds,  he  roused  himself  and 
read  the  poem.  It  failed  to  satisfy  him;  it  was 
a  tangle  of  treacherous  promises  and  pleading 
fragments — the  line  of  one  of  her  arms,  with 
an  ashen  delicateness ;  the  nervously  boyish 
rebuke  of  her  eyes;  the  tenuous  defiance  of  her 
heart;  the  curled  merriments  of  her  hair — frag- 

204 


BLACKGUARD 

merits  fastened  to  a  slip  of  white  paper  and 
lacking  the  great  surge  of  breath  that  could  have 
whirled  them  into  a  speaking  whole.  He  had 
written  other  poems  to  her  and  they  had  pro- 
duced the  same  result ;  but  still,  huddled  under  the 
tree,  he  continued  to  write,  much  like  a  dying  man 
who  has  no  choice  save  to  gasp  for  breath,  only 
in  his  case  it  was  a  ghost  that  struggled  to  avoid 
a  second  death.  The  ghost  was  seeking  to  escape 
a  final  extinction.  He  wrote  until  the  lengthened 
shadow  of  the  tree  told  him  that  he  must  return 
to  the  house ;  but  it  took  him  at  least  ten  minutes 
before  he  could  censure  his  face  and  control  his 
breath.  At  last,  with  the  thinly  passive  mask 
once  more  adjusted  and  held  by  the  slenderest  of 
threads,  he  walked  from  the  garden. 

At  supper  he  met  his  cousin.  Dr.  Joseph  Rosen- 
stein,  who  was  living  at  the  Edleman  home  and 
who  treated  him  with  a  suspecting  aifability. 
The  presence  of  a  poet  is  always  a  vague  challenge 
to  those  people  who  feel  that  he  is  somehow  at 
variance  with  the  complacent  finalities  of  their 
lives,  but  who  cannot  draw  the  difference  into  a 
clearer  antagonism.  For  this  reason  they  try  to 
cover  their  distrust  with  a  nervous  and  question- 
ing amiability.    After  jovially  advising  Carl  to 

205 


BLACKGUARD 

write  a  sonnet  to  a  doctor,  protesting  to  a  great 
admiration  for  the  prettiness  of  poetry,  and  asking 
Carl  whether  he  didn't  think  that  practical  people 
were  also  of  some  use  in  the  world,  Rosenstein 
deserted  the  farce  and  began  to  discuss  the  tech- 
nical details  of  an  operation  with  Dr.  Edleman. 
Bertha  Edleman  uttered  some  placid  remarks 
concerning  the  possibility  of  Carl's  writing  short 
stories  that  would  bring  him  a  great  deal  of 
money;  inquired  after  his  parents  in  a  detailed 
but  listless  way ;  and  then,  with  more  vigor,  com- 
menced to  speak  of  engagements,  marriages  and 
divorces  within  her  immediate  circle.  Dr.  Edle- 
man, by  turns  waggish  and  blunt,  presided  over 
the  groups  of  corrupted  words.  Since  Carl  was 
anxious  not  to  provoke  these  people,  he  stooped 
to  the  task  of  uttering  pleasantly  obvious  remarks 
in  a  timid  and  deliberate  fashion,  and  since  they 
secretly  felt  that  his  work  gave  him  a  rank  lower 
than  theirs,  they  liked  the  subdued  and  abashed 
manner  in  which  he  spoke. 


206 


BLACKGUARD 


CHAPTER    XVIII. 

After  that  evening  he  managed  to  protect  his 
loneliness  with  clever  words.  He  told  the  Edle- 
mans  that  he  was  looking  for  material  for  short 
stories  and  that  he  intended  to  roam  about  the 
city;  and,  elated  at  his  purpose,  they  did  not 
object.  Since  most  of  his  relatives  were  still 
displaying  their  dignity,  jewelry,  and  card-playing 
abilities  at  northern  summer  resorts,  he  found 
it  easy  to  be  alone. 

In  the  midst  of  his  restless,  empty  wanderings 
he  often  sat  for  a  while  in  a  little  park  that 
rustled  and  nodded  upon  the  top  of  a  bluff  over- 
looking a  broad  river.  There  he  would  stare  out 
at  the  wide,  yellowish-brown  flat  of  water,  and 
the  dull  green  convolutions  of  the  distant  shore, 
and  the  water  would  become  an  ethereal  canvas 
where  he  painted  fugitive  salutes  to  the  woman 
who  had  fled  from  life's  semblances.  Under  the 
spell  of  a  melting  daze  he  would  sit  for  hours, 
almost  unconscious  of  the  fact  that  he  held  a 
body  of  slowly  breathing  flesh.     At  one  end  of 

207 


BLACKGUARD 

the  park  the  line  of  benches  turned  sharply  in 
toward  the  city,  and  this  shaded  place,  guarded 
by  bushes  and  trees,  was  known  as  "Rounder's 
Corner."  It  was  frequented  by  thieves,  drug 
peddlers,  sly,  lacquered  women  and  an  occasional 
vagrant,  and  they  gathered  there  from  twilight 
on  and  drained  the  fierce  insincerities  of  conver- 
sation and  whiskey,  with  sometimes  the  lucid 
edge  of  cocaine.  Since  Carl  came  to  this  spot 
only  during  the  afternoons,  he  did  not  see  these 
people  until,  one  evening,  he  managed  to  absent 
himself  from  the  Edleman  home  on  the  pretense 
of  desiring  a  trip  on  a  river  steamboat,  and 
strolled  into  the  park. 

He  sat  on  a  bench  and  looked  around  him,  trying 
to  become  interested  in  the  immediate  contortions 
of  the  fantasy.  One  glance  told  him  the  identity 
of  the  social  circle  into  which  he  had  dropped 
and  he  felt  a  jerk  of  attention,  for  the  more 
openly  rough  and  cruel  people  in  life  were  to  him 
reflections  of  his  ghostly  self,  spied  in  a  coarsely 
exaggerated  mirror  but  none  the  less  valid.  Fresh 
from  the  lazy  inanities  of  the  Edleman  house,  he 
f  felt  a  little  baffled  vigor — the  ghost  lamenting  its 

lack  of  exercise — and  he  longed  to  roll  once  more 
in  that  plastic  phenomenon  which  men  insist  on 

208 


BLACKGUARD 

calling  mud.  It  was  only  through  plastering  him- 
self with  the  concentrated  moistness  of  earth  that 
he  could  force  himself  to  believe,  for  a  time,  in 
the  reality  of  life,  and  he  welcomed  his  chance 
to  repeat  this  process.  He  scanned  the  whisper- 
ing, laughing,  loose-faced  people  around  him  and 
turned  over  in  his  mind  different  ways  of 
approaching  them,  since  he  knew  how  easy  it 
was  to  heap  fuel  upon  their  suspicions. 

A  woman  dropped  down  beside  him  on  the 
bench.  She  was  young  in  actual  years — not  more 
than  twenty -three — but  her  body  had  been  slashed 
by  a  premature  herald  of  middle  age  and  her 
rounded  face  was  too  softly  plump  and  wrinkled 
a  little  under  the  eyes  and  below  the  chin.  Youth 
and  age  were  stiffly  twined  about  her  in  lines 
that  protested  against  each  other.  Her  body  was 
short  and  held  a  slenderness  that  was  unnaturally 
puffed  a  bit  here  and  there,  giving  an  impression 
of  incongruous  inflation  rather  than  of  solid  flesh. 
Her  black  hair  was  a  plentiful  mass  of  artificial 
curls  and  pressed  against  a  wide  straw  hat,  fes- 
tooned with  tulips  made  of  gaudy  cloth,  and  she 
was  clad  in  loosely  white  muslin  with  a  crimson 
sash  around  her  waist.  The  effect  was  that  of  a 
school  girl  playing  the  part  of  a  street  walker 

209 


BLACKGUARD 

in  an  amateur  theatrical  and,  if  you  looked  at  her 
clothes  alone,  the  illusion  remained.  It  was  only- 
destroyed  by  a  glance  at  her  face,  for  the  outward 
costumes  of  reality  are  often  unconsciously  ama- 
teurish, as  though  they  were  striving  to  obliterate 
the  professional  aspect  held  by  the  faces  of  human 
beings — a  psychic  confession.  Men  and  women 
can  never  quite  memorize  their  parts  in  life  and 
their  clothes  sometimes  express  this  absent- 
mindedness. 

As  he  looked  at  this  woman  Carl  noticed  that 
her  eyes  were  not  those  of  the  usual  flesh 
trader — shifting  and  infantile — but  were  filled 
with  a  tense  distraction.  The  mere  sullen 
aftermath  of  whiskey,  or  the  departure  of 
a  man?  No,  it  almost  seemed  that  she  was 
actually  brooding  over  emotions  that  had  removed 
her  leagues  from  the  bench  against  which  her 
body  was  pressed.  Eyes  are  often  unwitting 
traitors  and  they  tell  the  truth  more  readily  than 
the  rest  of  the  face,  or  words,  since  human  beings 
are  not  so  conscious  of  what  their  eyes  are 
announcing.  The  two  holes  in  the  mask  of  the 
face  are  often  transparent  or  careless  admissions, 
while  the  remainder  of  the  face  is  immersed  in 
a  more  successful  deception.    Carl  was  interested 

210 


BLACKGUARD 

by  the  fact  that  this  woman  seemed  to  ignore 
his  presence  and  was  staring  straight  ahead  of 
her.  He  began  to  believe  that  her  indifference 
was  genuine  and  he  watched  her  more  closely. 
Finally  she  tossed  her  head,  with  a  gesture  that 
expressed  the  defiant  return  of  consciousness,  and 
glanced  at  him.  Then  she  threw  him  the  usual 
"Hello,  honey,"  and  with  a  disgusted  grimace  he 
dismissed  a  certain  ghostly  audience  within  him, 
telling  it  that  the  play  would  not  begin.  For  a 
while  he  spoke  to  her,  throwing  slang  pebbles  at 
her  with  an  oppressed  exactitude  and  brushing 
aside  her  lustreless  insinuations,  a  little  weary 
of  the  unconvincing  comedy.  Suddenly  the  stunt 
nauseated  him  and  he  fled  back  to  his  own  meta- 
phoric  tongue. 

"Do  you  see  that  woman  passing  by  ?"  he  asked. 
"She  has  a  face  half  like  a  twitching  mouse  and 
half  like  a  poised  cat.  I  have  known  such  women. 
They  are  continually  robbing  certain  men  of 
emotions  in  order  meekly  to  hand  back  their 
thefts  to  other  men.  With  a  mixture  of  cruelty 
and  weak  submission  they  entertain  their  own 
emptiness." 

He  looked  away  from  her,  expecting  a  silence 
or  the  affront  of  cracked  laughter  and  preparing 

211 


BLACKGUARD 

to  leave.    Her  answer  swung  his  head  toward  her. 

"You  may  be  speaking  to  such  a  woman.  Life 
has  undressed  me  to  all  people  except  myself,  and 
I  don't  know  what  I  am.  I  think  that  I  was  bom 
to  be  a  nun,  but  something  kicked  me  down  a 
dirty  hallway  and  when  I  woke  up  there  were 
many  hands  reaching  for  me  and  it  didn't  seem 
important  to  me  whether  they  took  me  or  not. 
But  I  think  that  I  was  bom  to  be  a  nun.  .  .  . 
Does  that  interest  you?" 

He  stared  at  her  with  his  mouth  almost  describ- 
ing a  perfect  0  and  his  eyes  opened  to  a  wild 
uncertainty.  For  a  moment  he  felt  that  they 
were  both  quite  dead  and  that  her  spirit  had 
been  ravished  by  waiting  words. 

"In  God's  name,  what  have  you  been  doing?" 
he  cried. 

"Playing  a  part,  with  the  assistance  of  your 
indifferent  slang,"  she  said. 

"Why?" 

"I  started  out  by  talking  to  you  as  I  do  to 
most  men.  You  broke  into  a  rough  speech  and  I 
parried  as  usual.  The  evening  was  commencing 
in  its  usual  convincing  manner.  Then  I  began 
to  see  that  you  were  acting.  There  was  a  strain 
on  your  face,  and  sometimes  you  stopped  in  the 

212 


BLACKGUARD 

middle  of  a  delicate  simile.  ...  I  knew  that  I 
might  be  wrong,  so  I  kept  on  talking  as  you 
expected  me  to  talk." 

On  her  face  was  the  smile  of  a  beggar  whose 
tinselled  metaphors  have  been  pummeled  and 
disheveled  by  surface  realities.  The  plump  curves 
of  her  face  seemed  to  fit  less  snugly  beneath  the 
flat  deceit  of  rouge. 

"I  am  a  fool,"  he  said.  "Your  eyes  told  me 
something,  but  I  spat  upon  it.  I  think  that  you 
had  better  leave  me." 

"I  have  no  intention  of  leaving  you,"  she  said. 

They  sat  and  stared  at  each  other. 

"Do  you  give  yourself  to  different  men  every 
night?"  he  asked,  as  though  his  sophistication, 
in  an  instant  curve,  had  retreated  to  an  anxious 
child  long  concealed  within  him. 

"I  give  them  what  they  are  able  to  take,  and 
that  is  little.  They  want  to  clutch  me  for  a  time, 
but  I  don't  feel  them  unless  they  stop  my  breath- 
ing. A  man  walks  into  a  house,  wipes  his  feet 
on  the  mat,  spits  into  one  of  the  cuspidors,  and 
leaves  with  a  vacant  smile  on  his  face." 

"Why  do  you  want  them  to  come  in?" 

"They  give  me  money  for  whiskey  and  leisure 
time  in  which  I  can  read.    I've  never  been  able 

213 


BLACKGUARD 

to  find  a  simpler  way  of  getting  these  things." 

The  explanation  was  clear  and  delicate  to  him. 

"Of  course,  the  whiskey  makes  you  sneer  like 
a  queen,  and  the  books  bring  you  affairs  with 
better  men,"  he  said. 

"All  that  I  want  to  do  is  to  pray  to  my  thoughts 
with  appropriate  words,  and  every  night  until 
two  in  the  morning  I  pay  for  the  granting  of 
this  wish.  .  .  .  But  I  think  that  I  was  bom  to  be 
a  nun." 

"I  think  that  I  was  born  to  be  a  monk,  covering 
the  walls  of  his  cell  with  little  images,  all  of 
them  contorting  his  bright  hatred  for  a  world," 
he  said.  "I  think  that  something  also  kicked  me 
into  a  mob  of  prattling  marionettes,  leaving  me 
exposed  to  the  shower  of  unintended  blows.  I 
have  often  looked  behind  me  and  vainly  tried  to 
see  who  this  first  enemy  was,  but  I  am  afraid 
that  he  does  not  return  until  you  die." 

With  their  silence  they  continued  the  dialogue 
for  a  time. 

"Have  you  a  man  who  takes  your  money  and 
kicks  you?"  he  asked. 

"No.  Every  now  and  then  some  dope  peddler 
pays  me  a  visit,  but  I  have  a  gun  and  I  know 
how  to  use  it.    I  sent  one  of  them  to  a  hospital 

214 


BLACKGUARD 

once.  They  call  me  Crazy  Georgie  May  and 
they're  always  afraid  of  something  that  they 
can't  understand." 

"I  have  a  proposition  to  make  to  you,"  he  said. 
"We'll  live  together  without  touching  each  other 
and  each  of  us  will  be  the  monk  and  nun  that  he 
should  have  been.  I  am  a  ghost  who  wants  to 
return  to  life  and  you  are  a  living  person  who 
wants  to  go  back  to  the  ghost  that  was  kicked 
into  an  insincere  ritual  of  flesh.  We'll  erect  a 
unique  monastery  of  thought  and  emotion,  and 
pay  for  it  with  the  slavery  of  your  hands  or 
mine.  .  .  .  Will  you  live  with  me  in  this  fashion  ?" 

"Yes,  if  only  to  see  whether  it  can  be  done," 
she  answered  instantly. 

They  rose  from  the  bench  and  walked  away 
together — a  noble  rascal  and  an  ascetic  prostitute. 


215 


Typography  and  Printing   by  Printing  Service  Company,   Chicago. 
Electrotyped    by    Simpson-Bevans    Company,    Chicago. 


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